Lena Dunham’s satirical Social Justice League of America: Age of Imaginary Problems—a $100M mockery of Hollywood’s woke demands—features a "brilliant, dumpy" physicist who gains superpowers from radioactive chlamydia to force Americans to stop watching TV, culminating in the burial of "Microaggression Man" under the First Amendment’s rubble. Meanwhile, Trump’s rapid nomination and an Inspector General report slamming Hillary Clinton’s private email server (dismissed as biased but politically explosive) dominate headlines, while Bill Cosby’s trial and Elijah Wood’s abuse allegations expose Hollywood’s dark underbelly. Guest Tyler Smith debates whether films like The Sopranos depict or endorse immorality, closing with a Memorial Day tribute to the freedoms protected by soldiers and police. [Automatically generated summary]
Hollywood is under high pressure from the left to make movies in keeping with leftist policies.
After a gay and women's rights project of the ACLU claimed the movie industry didn't have enough female directors, two federal agencies launched investigations into Tinseltown's hiring practices.
Blacks have threatened to boycott the Academy Awards if they don't get affirmative action Oscars, and Twitter trolls are pushing studios to make Captain America gay and James Bond female.
In response, Hollywood studios have banded together to announce their big new tent poll release scheduled for next Kwanza.
A superhero extravaganza entitled Social Justice League of America, Age of Imaginary Problems.
The blockbuster will be written and directed by Lena Dunham, who will also play the lead role of Cicely Shrillwine.
According to a studio press release, Shrillwine is a brilliant, dumpy, and unattractive physicist who angrily quits MIT after a sexist professor penalizes her just because she doesn't know how to do any math.
Shrillwine retires to her secret laboratory hidden on the cliffs of Mount Grievance and there begins a series of secret experiments to find out just how little a single person can contribute to society while still complaining about being underpaid.
During the experiments, Shrillwine is bitten by a radioactive strain of chlamydia and is transformed into I'm So Special Girl, whose superpowers enable her to take off her clothes and make every single person in America stop watching television at the same moment.
I'm So Special Girl assembles an exciting array of superhero friends, including Transformer Man, or possibly woman, angry blackface, wheelchair girl, fabulous Dorothy Guy, and overly nice to animals person.
Their powers, when combined, make them almost completely unbearable.
The Social Justice League of America flies off to fight the evil microaggression man who has developed a destructive super gun that fires judgmental thoughts able to completely destroy the self-esteem of an entire university.
Even though Microaggression Man is too small for the human eye to see, a single disgruntled look from him can render you helpless by making you suspect you're nowhere near as terrific as your mom and dad always told you you were.
The heroes of SGLA soar off to sustainable city in their solar-powered jet, the dawdler, and arrive seven days later just in time to stop Microaggression Man from unleashing a forbidden thought on an unsuspecting public.
After a climactic battle that destroys skyscrapers, traditions, liberty, and most of the best ideas mankind ever had, the Social Justice League finally thwarts Microaggression Man by making a loud screechy noise whenever he tries to talk and then burying him under the rubble of the First Amendment.
Studio executive Bernie Solis told the Showbiz Trade Paper Variety that he was delighted at the plans for the film, saying, quote, it's way past time Hollywood caved in to every no-talent non-entity who can't come up with his own idea for a franchise and so instead wants to ruin ours.
Solis said his studio is still not sure whether it would be more profitable to make the new Lena Dunham film at an estimated budget of $100 million or to simply gather $100 million in a big pile and set it on fire than sell tickets to watch it burn.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin.
Rape Allegations Resurface00:15:18
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
It sounds like a great movie.
I know.
I'm taking the kids for Kwanzaa.
I mean, what else would I do?
All right, it's the last show before a long Claven.
It's the long Clavenless weekend because it's Memorial Day.
I know, I know.
We're going to have to get through it, but you can use this time to subscribe so you can be in our next mailbag, be part of the show, and eventually we'll get a video mailbag going on, I hope.
That'll be, yeah, that'll be cool.
And you can also watch, so it's free for 30 days, and then we automatically bill $10,000 from your parents' bank account.
No, I think it's $7.99 a month, so it's not bad.
$7.99 a month.
All right, and you get both me and Ben, right?
Yeah, okay.
So we're going to talk more about Hollywood today.
We're going to have my friend Tyler Smith, who is a film critic and also a Christian, and talk to him about why so many films with good values are so bad and why films with bad values are good and so on.
But first, we have to deal with the news of the day.
The first thing that just happened as I was driving into work, Donald Trump has now officially secured the Republican nomination.
He's no longer presumptive Trumptive.
He is now the actual guy, which is it really is amazing because he announced in June, so it's under a year, which may be a record for doing this.
He's now got all the delegates he needs and he's going to rack up more as he comes to California.
So good week for Trump, bad week for Hillary Clinton, bad week for Hillary Clinton.
And this, you know, this story is not only big news, it's going to get bigger.
This is going to be bigger.
The inspector general of the State Department released a report.
He didn't release a report.
He gave it to the government and the government leaked it to the press.
So somebody who doesn't like Hillary Clinton leaked it to the press.
And this thing just blasts Hillary over her use of a private email server.
Now, this guy, the Inspector General, is Steve Linnick, and he was appointed by Obama.
So, you know, he's not some right-winger going after Hillary.
This is what it says.
It says, Secretary Clinton should have preserved any federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the office of the secretary.
At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with department business before leaving government service.
And because she did not do so, she did not comply with the department's policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.
Now, you know, the reason this is so bad is it says she didn't comply with the policies, but the policies were there to implement the law.
Okay, so it's like if the police said that they were going to charge the guys who run the Daily Wire if I park illegally, the guys who run the Daily Wire would make a policy, a company policy saying don't park illegally to keep me in line with the law.
So that was the policy was there to keep the Secretary of State and everybody in line with the law.
So if you listen to this, they say she didn't, they go on to say that Colin Powell, this is what Hillary Clinton is clinging to, that Colin Powell also failed to keep records of some of his private emails.
But first of all, these rules were not fully in place when Colin Powell was Secretary of State.
And secondly, he never had a server at home where he was sending off State Department emails from like, you know, his laptop or something like this.
The report goes on to say through her counsel, Secretary Clinton declined the Inspector General's request for an interview, so she didn't turn up.
Every other person they were talking about, because they were looking at like five Secretaries of State, Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Conda Lisa Rice, and John Kerry, all came in for interviews.
And on top of this, there are emails that they released where people are saying, Hillary, you know, you ought to have an official State Department computer here.
And she keeps saying, no, because then they'll be able to get after my personal emails and find out how corrupt I am.
So, you know, well, maybe she didn't say that out loud, but that's pretty much what she was thinking.
So remember, we're going into the California primaries.
There's a new poll out that says that Clinton and Sanders are almost neck and neck.
It's 46% to 44%, a change from 48% to 41% in the last poll.
So that's neck and neck because that's in keeping with the margin of error.
There's 548 delegates, I think, approximately, Democrat delegates at stake.
So it's not that Sanders can win, even if she loses California, even if she has to divvy up the delegates in California, she's still going to win.
But it just looks awful.
Even Wolf Blitzer, right?
These guys who have been running a point for the Obama administration for seven years, Wolf Blitzer has Brian Fallon, Hillary's spokesman.
And this guy is like, this guy's too smooth for school, as far as I'm concerned.
This guy goes out there.
And he's like, yeah, well, you know, it says that other people did it.
Well, listen to this.
Wolf Blitzer is saying, why didn't she go and talk to the Inspector General?
It looks as if she's got something to hide when she doesn't even want to answer questions from the Inspector General of the State Department.
No, well, look, Wolf, if she had anything to hide, she wouldn't be volunteering since last August to go face questions from the Justice Department, where the stakes will be much higher than this State Department IG investigation.
And as I said, the appropriateness of the State Department IG's office conducting this review at the same time when the Justice Department was already looking to this same issue is an open question.
There were questions raised about this office during the course of its investigation.
There were reports about individuals in this office coming forward and suggesting that there were hints of an anti-Clinton bias inside that office.
All of that.
That's interesting.
Are you accusing the Inspector General of the State Department of having an anti-Clinton bias?
And once again, this Inspector General was named by President Obama.
Actually, Wolf, I think the report today backs up much of what we were saying and includes an appropriate amount of context about how widespread the use of personal email was.
So I actually think the report today puts a lot of those questions to bed based on how fair it was in explaining that the use of personal email was widespread and done by her predecessors, including Secretary Powell.
Yeah, that's not going to fly.
And the reason, you know, it's like, yeah, everybody was doing it, but they weren't.
And she didn't ask permission and she didn't get permission.
And all the things she said were untrue.
She didn't hand in all her emails.
She said repeatedly that she's handed them all in.
There are weeks when she first started that she hasn't handed in any.
There are some that are obviously still missing.
It's just, you know, it just kind of shatters everything that she had to say and it makes her look bad.
And the thing is, the Democrats, for now, will stand up for her.
But the reason it's going to be bigger is people don't like having to lie for you.
People don't mind lying for themselves because they convince themselves they're telling the truth, but they don't like it when you ask them to lie for them.
Remember, Bill Clinton did this to everybody who got close to him.
Everyone who got close to him.
I didn't have any affair with Monica Lewinsky.
And he sent people out and they stood in front of the camera and they stood up for Bill Clinton.
And then it turned out they were lying without knowing it.
They don't like that very much.
And this just reminds people of that.
The people who remember the 90s are not going to be happy to have these guys back.
And of course, Donald Trump is making hay.
Here's Trump.
And everybody said, the pundits, the geniuses back there, they all said that Hillary, as I say, crooked Hillary, crooked Hillary.
She's as crooked as they come.
She had a little bad news today, as you know, from some reports came down, weren't so good, but not so good.
The Inspector General's report, not good.
But I want to run against Hillary.
Not me.
I just want to run against her.
This is going to be the funnest fascist dictatorship ever.
This guy is just, I just love the thing with the president.
There's geniuses in the back there.
He does everything but slap them.
He does everything but walk back and just go, whack.
All right, so we'll hear about this some more.
But let's pause for a moment now and move over and look at Hollywood because remember, there's a Hollywood left wing connection, very deep, very deep connection.
Ellen DeGeneres is going to be supporting Hillary.
She has announced that she will use her extremely popular show to back Hillary.
Hillary's going to go on with the Lady Ghostbusters movie, which should go over just about as well as her campaign is going over.
All right.
But meanwhile, out of Hollywood are coming these stories.
A big one, obviously, is Bill Cosby is now going to stand trial.
A Pennsylvania judge has said there's enough evidence for him to stand trial on three of the counts of drugging and raping women, but he's been accused by at least 50 at this point.
And look, this is a story that breaks my heart.
Bill Cosby was a big hero of mine when I was a kid.
I mean, really, the poster on the wall and everything.
I loved Cosby.
And he was a groundbreaking comedian, groundbreaking actor, not just because he was black, but because of his point of view was so hilarious.
You know, obviously has some kind of sick thing that he's doing where you're drugging women and sleeping with them.
It doesn't even sound fun, you know, but like, I mean, that was something he felt that he had to do.
And the question really is, the question really is, and I don't want to convict him, but I will say that I have talked to people who have convinced me that there is substance to these charges.
Let's put it that way.
And, you know, the thing is, how did he get away with it so long?
How did he get away with it so long?
I mean, everybody must have known.
People must have known.
People know these things.
These women were around.
I know people who knew these women.
They were around.
They were telling people.
How did he get away with it?
That's the question.
The guy's 70 in his 70s now.
How did he get away with it?
And that's the question.
And this comes the same time from Elijah Wood, the Lord of the Rings star, right?
Lord of the Rings star, this is from the Daily Mail talking about an interview he gave to the Times.
Lord of the Ring star, Elijah Wood, claims that young actors in Hollywood are being sexually abused by predatory, high-powered vipers working in the industry.
The Hobbit actor, 35, told the Sunday Times that the child abuse is probably still happening.
Shocking allegations that top Hollywood figures have been protecting child abusers have circulated wildly in recent widely in recent years.
Several industry figures have been convicted following claims of sex abuse, and former child actors, including the Goonies actor Corey Feldman, now 44, claimed he was surrounded by molesters when he was a teenager.
And Henry, co-founder of Biz Parents, a group to help young actors, said that Tinseltown is currently sheltering around 100 active abusers.
And this was a big story a while back when Corey Feldman came out with it.
It's this digital entertainment network, which was operating about 15 miles from where I'm sitting right now.
It was having these big parties, and the parties were meant to bring in young, hopeful stars and let these child molesters prey on them.
It's essentially a new twist on the old casting couch.
The fact that it's gay kids is only incidental, there's gay predators, is only incidental because the predators are everywhere.
I mean, you know, many people may not remember Roman Polanski, still a very big director, won the Oscar very recently for, what was it, the pianist.
And he made a classic movie, Chinatown.
He made a famous movie, Rosemary's Baby.
He's an excellent director.
In 1977, he had a girl over who wanted to be a model, and he drugged and forcibly sodomized her.
He was 13 years old.
He was charged with that, but he confessed.
He made a plea bargain where he pled to a lesser charge, okay?
And this is why, well, he pled to a lesser charge, and then realizing he might have to go to prison, he blew the country, okay?
Because this is a long time ago.
I'm all for forgiveness.
The woman herself says she's gotten over it, but he never served his time.
He is a fugitive from justice.
And yet, when a few years ago he stepped into Switzerland and the Swiss authorities arrested him, all of Hollywood turned out in his defense.
This was when Whoopi Goldberg made her famous remark about him.
I know it wasn't rape, rape.
Yeah, there was a statutory child molest, maybe?
I'm not sure what charges.
It was something else, but I don't believe it was rape, rape.
And when we get all the information, somebody will tell me in my ear.
All I'm trying to get you to understand is when we're talking about what someone did and what they were charged with, we have to say what it actually was, not what we think it was.
Okay, so it wasn't rape, rape.
Polanski, when he was asked about this at the time, right, he was on television when he was charged with it.
He said, well, I wanted young girls.
That's what we all want.
We all want young girls.
So what's the big deal?
Woody Allen, recently accused by his adopted daughter Dylan, of having raped, molested her when she was seven years old.
He denies it, but he just got back from Cairns.
He wasn't asked about it.
Nobody said a word about it.
Just big applause for the genius director.
My friend John Nolte, an excellent observer of Hollywood, has claimed for years that Hollywood is making movies trying to normalize child sexual abuse.
An adult using a child for sex is rape.
There's no question about it.
Not rape, rape, it's not rape, any kind of rape.
A child does not have the capacity to know what to do, to know whether to say yes or no.
And that's what rape is.
It's taking somebody without their consent, and a child can't give informed consent.
It is rape, pure and simple, rape down to the ground.
And so Nolte claims, well, Alan Ball made this movie Towelhead and Kate Winslet made the reader.
And this is all, you know, he wrote this a few years ago.
Let me bring on my guest.
Have we got our guest?
Yes.
All right, Tyler Smith is a film critic, and he also happens to be a Christian, and he sees things from a really, really interesting point of view.
He has two movie podcasts.
One is called Battleship Pretension, which I love, and the other is called More Than One Lesson.
How you doing, Tyler?
Not bad.
How are you?
Good, good.
So I'm just, I'm just, I hope you heard a little bit of that parade of atrocity coming out of our friends in Hollywood.
I did.
There's no better introduction than, hey, rape, rape, rape.
Let's bring in Tyler Smith.
That's funny.
It's funny you're always introduced like that.
I don't know what that.
No, I'm not.
But, you know, first of all, people are always complaining.
People on the right are always saying, we want more G-rated films.
We want more films with good values and all this.
First of all, are they right to complain and do they really want them?
It's hard to know because, you know, it's so I'm such a film nerd and one could say a film snob that I don't know what real people want.
Well, like normal, actual people want anymore.
It's just me and my dumb friends.
Well, then let me ask you this then.
All right, let me ask you this.
When these films come out, especially Christian films, films with, you know, people like you and me, who are a little bit art, we're culture vultures, we're a little bit snobby.
We look at these films like God Is Not Dead and all these things, and we think, it's not that they're terrible, it's that they're kind of like romantic comedy level films.
Why are so many Christian films so bad?
Well, and here's my first disagreement with you.
Okay.
I think they are terrible.
All right.
I was being nice.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, you have to be more diplomatic than me.
When you're a critic, you can just say whatever you want, and people will hate you no matter what.
So, yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to, I think there's a difference between serving your audience and pandering to your audience.
Serving vs. Pandering00:09:52
And I think a lot of Christian filmmakers think that they're serving their audience.
But in fact, all they're doing is telling their audience, you're right, and nobody understands you but me.
Which is a certain type of populism that as we've seen in politics lately kind of works.
And so, you know, and so when people are, when they look at the rest of Hollywood and they see that these films don't reflect my beliefs or values, they'll turn to, you know, it's that any port in a storm kind of thing.
And yet, and this happens pretty regularly with any number of demographics.
Like if you're not a guy age 18 to 35, people are regularly fascinated that you're interested in seeing movies.
So like, you know, like for African Americans and women, like anytime a movie does well, like when Tyler Perry movies started doing well, people thought like, how are these doing so well?
Well, because it's an underserved audience.
Right.
And it's the same with, it's the same with the Christian audience.
And yet when I saw the film Revenant, which I really liked a lot, and said it was a Christian film, when I've talked about the fact that I think The Sopranos has Christian values, I mean, despite all the sex, open sex, and the cursing and the violence and all this stuff, Christians write to me en masse and tell me I'm out of my mind.
There's nothing Christian about these films.
What do you think?
I think they're incorrect because, yeah, and I've gotten a fair amount of that myself.
You know, I think there's a difference between depicting something and endorsing it.
You know, if you're going to show, let's go with the Sopranos.
If you're going to have a show about the mob, okay, well, these are people who are perpetually choosing themselves over anybody else.
And so that's going to, it's just, it's basically a world of hedonism.
And so there's going to be a lot of swearing.
There's going to be a lot of sex.
There's going to be a lot of violence.
And frankly, if you want to really depict that world and you really want to show the depravity of that world, I personally feel like you need to show it, maybe not in the most graphic detail, but in enough to really get it.
And I think a lot of people seem to think that simply by showing that, that the show is endorsing that and endorsing this lifestyle.
I got into this debate a lot with The Wolf of Wall Street, which I thought was a wonderful film.
And I thought it I definitely don't think Scorsese endorses this lifestyle, but some people say, like, look at this excess.
It's like, exactly, it's excess.
Do you want to be this character?
I don't.
I might want his money, but I certainly don't want to be him.
It was an amazing thing.
I felt only a lapsed Catholic director could have made a movie in which sex looked so unappealing.
I mean, you did walk away from that movie thinking, boy, I hope I never am in that situation because he made it really look ugly.
And there comes a moment in Wolf of Wall Street to stick with that for a moment because this actually happened not merely with Christians that I know, but with other critics who thought like, who thought like, well, for the average person, you know, they might not be able to pick up on what Scorsese is doing.
And my first thought is like, well, that's a little bit condescending.
But also, to me, the minute he punches his wife in the stomach, it seems to me that the film is not endorsing anything that could have led to that decision.
Right.
Right.
So it's but but that's the thing is it comes down to this concept, the concept of discernment, which is to kind of comb through things, recognize that not everything's for you.
But even those can be serving a larger truth, one that you that you might actually agree with.
You know, there's this writer, Christian writer Matt Walsh, who has come out repeatedly and attacked Game of Thrones and any Christian who watches Game of Thrones, my favorite television show, possibly my favorite television show of all time.
I mean, a show, it's a show.
Yeah, I mean, it's a show I almost watch in real time.
You know, I videotape it and then rush upstairs and watch it.
Videotape it.
That's what, 1962.
I use the old gizmo.
I power up.
They can put some coal in the old gizmo.
What do you think?
You think it can be a sin to watch something like that?
That's essentially what Walsh is saying.
I do think that there are matters of conviction.
I'll say this.
I don't watch Game of Thrones because of some of the stuff that I struggle with, personally.
And that's the thing that my wife and I have talked about.
I watched the first episode.
It's filled with nudity.
And as I, and there was one scene where I thought the nudity felt like it's like this absolutely needed to happen.
The rest of it seemed like excess, but I don't condemn you for watching it.
Meanwhile, maybe my favorite show of all time is Deadwood, which had plenty of that stuff.
But it didn't set off any alarms, whereas Game of Thrones, for me, did.
But I'm not going to be upset with you because I think you're a smart enough guy and a sincere enough Christian that while we do need to be on our guard, I think you're able to keep those guards up and get out of it what you can to sort of enrich your own, enrich your own life.
I also feel that HBO does this repeatedly.
Showtime does it repeatedly.
What they do is they stock the first season with completely extraneous and useless sex to the point where at one point I turned to my wife and said, put your shirt on, sister.
I'm trying to hear the dialogue.
It's like, they just do it to distract.
Whenever somebody had to explain something, some girl took off her clothes.
But then they stop.
By now, there really is not a lot of extraneous nudity in it.
And just to be honest about it, I mean, yeah, is it a thrill?
Yeah, it is.
But the story is great.
And I don't know.
I guess I feel like, you know, one of the things on my path to Christianity, one of the books I read, was by the Marquis de Sade, who wrote essentially sadistic pornography.
And I was reading him.
I hate to say it, but I was reading him not for that, but for his atheist philosophy.
And I thought these two things go together, the sadism and this atheism go together.
And it convinced me that I was not an atheist and could never be an atheist.
So, I mean, if a guy is honest, I guess I feel that's where the truth comes out.
If a guy is honest, the truth comes out no matter what he's trying to say, basically.
And that's what I think of Game of Thrones.
I just think it's an amazingly truthful thing.
So when you, you made a point.
You stopped watching Game of Thrones because you felt of what it did to you.
There was something wrong with that.
But not filming.
On two levels.
I would say, based on, and at this point, just through cultural osmosis and being friends with people that I'm friends with, I've picked up on a lot of Game of Thrones, you know, Red Wedding, the Mountain and the Viper, stuff like that.
And so not only is it like the titillation of nudity and that kind of thing, but also, I think just philosophically, I think it would do, and emotionally, I think it would really do a number on me, that just when I'm starting to feel optimistic, my favorite thing is horrendously.
It's not a happy show.
You might want to wait for the musical to come out.
I think that's it.
What is the problem?
Do you think, do you believe what John Nolte said that Hollywood, you know, we always talk about, you and I both know that Hollywood is not a monolith.
I mean, it's a lot of different people doing different things.
But it does sometimes seem that they are selling us a cultural bill of goods.
And not only that, as I said in my opening, that they are being pressured to sell us a left-wing cultural bill of goods.
Do you feel that – A, do you – let me ask you this.
Do you feel that they are?
And do you feel that it matters that they are?
If they are?
So there's a certain degree of idealism in me that I believe that people, I'll put the studio system to the side for a moment, and I'll just talk about individual writers and directors.
I think if you're an artist, you're trying to put your own point of view, your own interpretation of the world out there for people to see.
You're trying to engage with the audience.
And people in Hollywood, by and large, are left-leaning.
They're not particularly sympathetic to Christians.
And so they will sincerely try to communicate their beliefs.
And so that's me trying to be as diplomatic as I can.
But then every once in a while, you know.
And so I'll watch movies and I'll see that, okay, well, there's some stuff in here I don't believe in and things I don't agree with.
And that's okay.
I don't watch movies to have my own personal beliefs affirmed.
Like, my beliefs are fine.
They're not going anywhere.
I don't need a movie to tell me I'm right.
But there will, every once in a while, there are certain filmmakers and there's just certain, I would say, movements of film which are much more aggressive in their merely enough that they want to express what they believe.
And certainly when you express a belief, you want to try to influence the audience.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
But like, it's one thing to try to persuade the audience, another thing to try and manipulate them, to browbeat them, to bully them, to feel, to, and one could even say shaming them for these things that they believe.
And it's like, come on, can't you just get past these old-fashioned flyover state ideas?
And that's when for me it really becomes jarring.
And that's when I haven't watched a Michael Moore movie in many.
Nobody has, I think.
All right, well, I'm out of time, unfortunately.
I'd like to continue the conversation, but we'll have you back and we'll talk about it some more.
Tyler Smith, he has two movie podcasts, Battleship Pretention, and more than one lesson.
Tyler, thanks a lot for coming on.
I'll talk to you again.
Thanks for having me.
All right, bye-bye.
I mean, one of my feelings about this, by the way, is I believe that, like, I believe so deeply that God is real that I think if somebody tells an honest story, even if it's an honest atheist story, God is going to shine through that story.
So that's one of the reasons I'm not as worried about it.
Stuff I like.
We'll Have You Back00:03:09
We are approaching Memorial Day.
I'd like to end with some music.
I want to read you just one small thing that I wrote.
It's a small paragraph from an essay I wrote about the poem Beowulf, which is the first poem in English.
I was for a collection of essays on different works that could be called thrillers, and I wrote about Beowulf.
And I was talking about the military ethos, the warrior ethos in Beowulf.
And I said, We in the modern West have been so powerful, so dominant, so safe in our homes for so long that we slip too easily into the illusion that we live at peace.
We are never at peace, not really.
When we go to the ballet or walk in the park or stop to smell a rose or read a book, we only do so by the good graces of the fighters who stand ready to kill and die to defend us.
Soldiers on our borders, police officers on our streets, only the threat of their physical force keeps those who would murder, rob, or enslave us at bay.
Every moment of tranquility and freedom implies the warrior who protects it.
So as you're enjoying your tranquility and freedom this Memorial Day and laughing hilariously at the fix we've all gotten ourselves into politically, just remember that somebody paid a very, very high price for it.
Here is Billy Ray Cyrus singing Some Gave All, and then we'll come back.
You folks even knew his name.
But a hero, yes, was he left boy, come back man.
Still many just don't understand about the reasons we are free.
I can't forget the look in his eyes or the tears he cried as he said these words to me.
Some gave all Stood through the red, white, and blue And some had to fall.
If you ever think of all your liberties and recall, I'm Andrew Klavan.