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Dec. 20, 2016 - Andrew Klavan Show
34:30
Ep. 241 - Germans Die, America Lives!

Andrew Clavin mocks Everyday Feminism’s Susannah Weiss for equating Trump’s rhetoric with her abusive ex’s tactics, then pivots to Europe’s Islamist violence—Berlin’s Christmas market attack (12 dead), a Pakistani suspect, and Putin’s measured response—while blaming Merkel’s refugee "invasion" and elite governance failures. He contrasts leftist hysteria over Trump’s Electoral College win with electors’ stoic duty, dismisses alt-right racialism as misguided, and slams Rogue One for lacking mythic depth like Star Wars’ original arc or Lord of the Rings. Concluding with a 17th-century Christmas hymn’s biblical roots, he ties cultural decline to moral decay over Enlightenment rationalism. [Automatically generated summary]

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Five Gaslighting Phrases 00:02:56
Well, we wouldn't want Christmas to come without making a visit to our favorite website, Everyday Feminism.
Because Everyday Feminism is where women go at Christmas to learn how to perform useful womanly activities like baking those sensational star-shaped shortbread cookies and complaining endlessly about every little thing until they make themselves and everyone around them miserable.
Except I was kidding about the cookies.
Today on Everyday Feminism, there's a post called Five Gaslighting Phrases Donald Trump Used That Remind Me A Lot of My Abusive Ex-Boyfriend by Susannah Weiss.
I'm not making this up.
Now, gaslighting is an expression that comes from an old stage play in which an evil husband tries to make his wife think she's going crazy by, among other things, turning the gaslights up and down and then pretending he doesn't see the change.
To gaslight someone means to tell them that they're not seeing what they obviously see.
You can try it yourself by telling a friend, there are no Muslims blowing things up and killing people.
Anyone who sees that must be Islamophobic.
Just watch.
It'll drive them nuts.
Anyway, back to everyday feminism.
One phrase Donald Trump used that reminded Susannah Weiss of how her abusive ex-boyfriend used to gaslight her is, I never said I'm a perfect person.
This phrase reminded Susanna Weiss of how her abusive ex-boyfriend used to borrow money from her and not pay her back.
When she would complain, he would say, I never said I was a perfect person.
And then she would forgive him and loan him more money, leading us to question Susanna Weiss's intelligence.
Now she's crying and moaning about all the money she loaned him, but that's ridiculous.
After all, the man never said he was a perfect person.
Another gaslighting phrase Trump used that reminded Susanna Weiss of her abusive ex-boyfriend was, this is nothing more than a distraction from the important issues.
This reminded Susanna Weiss of how she would try to discuss things like gay marriage with her abusive ex-boyfriend, and he would say, why discuss gay marriage when there are some places where gay people are being killed?
Really, come to think of it, that's a good point.
So maybe on that one, Susanna Weiss should have tried to focus on the more important issues.
Trump also accused Hillary Clinton of playing the woman's card.
This reminded Susanna Weiss of that time.
She was watching a movie with her abusive ex-boyfriend and a sexy nude scene came on and Susanna Weiss told her abusive ex-boyfriend that it was sexist because it was always the women in movies who were nude.
And he said she was just playing the woman card.
And she got all whiny about it because obviously she didn't realize that he was just trying to get her to pipe down so he could enjoy the hot naked babes.
So, as we can see, there are many ways Donald Trump reminds Susanna Weiss of her abusive ex-boyfriend.
There are also many ways Susanna Weiss reminds me of a really annoying girl I used to go out with, who was also named Susanna Weiss.
Huh, trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin show.
Hunky donkey, life is tickety.
Boo birds are winging, also singing hunky dunkity, shaped seat topsy.
The world is a bibbyzing.
Why Susanna Remains Annoying 00:06:05
It's a wonderful day hurrah, hooray.
It makes me want to sing, oh hurrah hooray, oh hooray, hoorah.
Merry christmas, everyday feminism.
It's the site that gives all year.
It's the least we can do.
All right, who is this out there?
What is this?
Lord's the leaping, so it's Lord Baldimar leaving.
Lord Baldimore is leaping.
I should have known that, of course, but thank you, Austin, for the 12 days of Andrew Clavin Christmas.
I hope it's been brilliant stuff.
Mailbag tomorrow.
Tomorrow is the mailbag.
You must subscribe to the Daily Wire to be in the mailbag.
The end of the year will come and you won't have your questions answered.
But if you subscribe, you can send in your questions and we will answer them with 100% guaranteed accuracy, 98.5% guaranteed to change your life possibly for the better.
So be there for this.
So there's a lot of, I mean, it was almost like a clavenless weekend day yesterday throughout Europe.
A lot of violence going on.
Obviously, that horrific assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey, which was caught on video because the ambassador was making a speech in an art gallery, and the guy who killed him was a security guy, he was a police guy, and was standing right next to him, just blew him away and started shouting Alahu Akbar and about Syria.
You know, we're dying in Syria.
You're killing us in Syria.
We'll kill you here.
I have to say that Vladimir Putin handled this really well.
I'm going to become a Trump guy.
I like Putin.
You know, he's one of these.
But he did.
He said that this is, obviously, they're trying to cause a rift between Turkey and Russia, and he's not going to let it happen.
And that's a good thing.
That is a good thing.
You do not want people, you know, people have gone to war over less than this, and you don't want that happening.
But it was just a shocking moment, I have to say, even at this point when we're all getting inured to it.
But the one that I want to talk about is the one in Berlin.
This is, you know, they have these, they call them Christkindelmarkt.
It means, you know, it's a Christmas market, a Christmas children market.
I think there are now 12 dead.
A guy drove his truck in, like the one in Nice, drove his truck in, just wiped people out with it.
They have arrested a Pakistani immigrant at this point, but they're not sure.
I'm not sure if it's the right guy.
One of the police spokesmen said they might not have the right guy, and one of, or somebody else may still be on the loose with a gun.
So it's a scary situation.
These things, these Christmas markets, I was at the one in Munich, which has been there since like the 13th, 14th century.
And it really, first of all, they're beautiful.
I write about this in The Great Good Thing.
They're like stepping into a Christmas card.
You get there in a snowy and beautiful Christmas tree.
There's children singing, markets all over the place where they're selling very beautiful old-fashioned toys and things like this.
But this is an old, old Christmas tradition.
So the symbolism here is really, really intense.
These are these people, people feel like they have been invaded.
Angela Merkel has let in hundreds of thousands of these refugees and people feel like they're under invasion.
And even before this crisis that was brought on by the bobbling of the ball of our leaders, including Barack Obama, that let Syria devolve into the civil war and all these refugees coming in.
But even before this, there was a sense in Europe that they were being invaded by an alien population.
Let's listen to a British tourist, Emma Rushton, who was in the market when this happened.
This is an interview she gave to Sky News.
I'm running on adrenaline at the moment, so everything's coming out quite fast.
So we arrived at lunchtime today.
I've never been to Berlin before, first holiday.
And we decided to wander down to the Christmas market and partake in some of the malt wine and whatever else was on offer.
And we sat and we were drinking.
And very luckily, I broke my leg a few years ago and have to sit down for a lot longer than I would normally.
My friend said, let's go.
And I said, well, give me two minutes.
And then we heard a really loud bang and saw some of the Christmas lights to our left starting to be pulled down.
And then we saw the articulated vehicle going through people and through the stalls and just pulling everything down.
And then everything went dark.
So it was very difficult to be there.
Yeah, so, you know, the Interior Minister of Germany came out and said, we're at war.
We're at war.
And the thing about that war, though, is that lady is in the war.
And that's not the way wars usually go.
I mean, wars are usually fought on battlefields or in the past have been fought in battlefields.
And yes, civilians get caught up in it.
But this is a war that is taking place against civilians, against ladies like that.
Here she goes on to talk about how she got out.
Yeah, there was lots of screaming.
There were lots of people yelling.
So the stall that we bought our Maldwine from was completely crushed.
And there were people tearing off the wooden panels to get the people out.
Luckily, everyone in there was pulled out.
But as we walked, we just wanted to get back to the hotel as quickly as possible.
We just didn't want to stay because we didn't know if something else was going to happen or whether we would, we just didn't know.
We just didn't know.
And we saw people and we just had to kind of steal our eyes and just walk through.
And I wanted to stop and help, but we just wanted to make sure that we were safe, firstly.
Yeah, well, you know, you hear that.
It's very moving because, of course, these are people out there, you know, celebrating Christmas.
As I said, I've been to these markets, the one in Munich, and it really is a beautiful, beautiful, uplifting experience.
Wise Men and Failed Ideas 00:03:36
And to have these guys invading it is really, you know, a symbol of something that has gone terribly wrong.
See, this is the thing.
When these attacks take place, it's a very emotional moment.
And you often hear the left guys, you know, nutcases like Paul Krugman of the New York Times will say, oh, well, I hope it's probably a right-wing white male or something like that.
As if that would change the situation we're in.
If a right-wing white male were to go on a rampage, heaven forfend, and kill somebody, that would mean that there was a crazy right-wing white male.
What this means is it is reminding us of a steady state of a problem that we're in, of an overall arching problem.
We are watching the, we're not only watching a bad idea in the sense that Islamism is a bad idea, we're watching the true collapse of the elite's great idea.
What they thought was their great idea has failed and it has failed everywhere.
And this is why the British are leaving the EU.
This is why there's Brexit.
This is why there's Donald Trump.
This is why the Italian government fell.
This is why Angela Merkel, who may be in big trouble when she is up for re-election next year.
You know, this is why the people are revolting.
The idea has failed.
And the idea that has failed is that experts should rule us, that the elites should rule us, that the elites know best.
This idea has been in the wind at least since the Enlightenment.
It's really been around since Plato, I think.
This idea that there is a right way to be.
You can reason your way to the right way.
Wise men are those people who can reason well.
Therefore, wise men should tell you what to do.
And they argue, well, you're not unfree because no free man who was wise would do anything other than what we're telling you to do.
And this is why they hate religion, because religion sort of says, no, it's you inside you, each one of you, where the truth resides.
The truth does not reside in a panel of experts.
It is not to be reached entirely by reason.
It has to be reached to some degree by revelation and to some degree by feeling your way.
There is no science of morality and there is no way that the experts can do it.
And this is, you know, this is the idea behind communism.
It is the idea behind every totalitarian government, and it is collapsing.
They let a, you know, listen, this is not to attack Islam in general.
There are 1.6 billion Islamic people in the world.
There's no doubt in my mind that some of them use Islam to connect with the true God.
I'm sure that that is true.
The problem is that there is something in Islam and always has been that is antithetical to the West.
The West was built, the West, as we know it, was built at war with Islam.
Islam was trying to wipe out Europe.
Europe won and established itself and Islam faded into primitivism essentially.
And in every country where Islam is the majority religion, not perhaps in every single country, but in most countries, there is oppression, there is inequality, there is a mistreatment of women that is just, you know, I mean, I love to make fun of feminism, but I'm deeply committed to the rights of women, which I consider to be two antithetical things, two things that are opposed to one another.
But there is a problem with letting people in in these numbers who might hold a philosophy that is completely opposed to everything we love.
Need for Regulations 00:15:10
And you can't sit in a room with a bunch of experts and say, yes, but this makes us feel so good.
See, we understand.
The people may be prejudiced.
The people may be prejudiced.
Well, we understand that, you know, this is the good.
This is the great global thing that we have to go forward.
You know, Brett Stevens wrote a column today about something entirely different that had an insight in it that was so brilliant.
You know, sometimes people say things that put into words things you're already thinking, and you think, ah, that's really great.
But every now and again, somebody comes up with an idea that just has not occurred to you, that is so right that the minute you read it, it's like bingo.
And Brett Stevens is interesting because I had real problems with him during the election.
He went off on Ted Cruz.
I felt without any evidence, without supplying at least any evidence that his attacks on Cruz were justified.
I thought he was wrong.
I thought he was, I didn't necessarily think he was wrong in his attacks on Donald Trump, but I thought he was being blind to what was happening.
He wasn't listening to the people and what their discontents were.
And he is an elite.
He's a very elitist kind of guy, and he doesn't understand why people get upset about immigration.
However, he's also a brilliant, capacious mind with a real moral compass.
And so you don't reject people because they're wrong, because everybody's wrong sometimes.
And sometimes I think thought Brett Stevens was wrong, but at least he's thinking about why he was wrong.
And he wrote a piece today, and I'm sure it went to press way before the terrorist attacks, about regulations.
And I, you know, this is something I hump about all the time, too many regulations.
And he talks about the fact that the World Bank published a survey on how friendly governments are to business.
And the United States under Obama has fallen in that survey.
When Obama took office, the U.S. was third in the overall index of how easy it was to do business here.
And now it is, I think it's eighth.
It's in eighth place since Obama came in.
And everything has become harder.
It's become harder to start a business.
It's become harder to enforce a contract.
All these things have become harder because of regulations.
And this is part of what's driving people crazy in the Midwest and part of the manufacturing class.
And here's Stevens' insight that is just brilliant.
You know, I think I'm going to cut off here and get to that insight in just a minute.
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So, Brett Stevens is writing about regulations.
And I know this seems like a tangent, but it actually does apply to this separation between the people and the experts.
And he says that business is getting harder in America because of the result of a never-ending accretion of ever more costly and time-consuming regulations, all of which could, in theory, be overturned at a stroke.
These regulations go largely unnoticed by coastal elites because we're mostly in the business of producing and manipulating words.
We're politicians, lawyers, bureaucrats, academics, consultants, pundits, and so on.
But regulations and those who profit for them are the bane of anyone who produces or delivers things.
Jet engines, burgers, pool supplies, you name it.
Word makers have the benefit of the First Amendment, that great guard against speech regulation to keep the government at arm's length from their work.
People who make things do not have that protection.
It's one of the reasons, he says, our worlds seem politically so far apart.
This is why the chattering classes, me, the politicians, the lawyers, don't understand why everybody's so angry because the First Amendment is protecting them from those experts who sit around going, we need a rule about this.
We need a rule about that.
We need a rule about where you put your window.
We need a rule about how you sweep your floor.
We need a rule about how many handicapped people you have to hire.
We need a rule about your fire, this, all of which is just taking the blood out of American businesses, American manufacturing.
If they did that to words, suddenly we would go nuts.
No, you can't use that word.
They want to do it.
They're dying to do it.
Political correctness is their attempt to do it.
Hate speech regulations, their attempt to do it.
But the First Amendment stops them.
And so we don't know what it's like.
I can come in here and say any damn thing I want.
Facebook can cut me off YouTube, but I can keep coming back and I will eventually get the word out because the First Amendment protects me from the nonsense regulations that they are making on everybody else.
But if you make hamburgers, if you make, I mean, it's a brilliant, Brett Stevens makes a brilliant point.
This is why we don't know, because the First Amendment keeps us from the slavery of regulation that is going on.
And that is why when these guys sit up there and they say, well, you know, we need this many immigrants.
We need them to come in.
We need them to live in your neighborhood.
We need them to live on your street.
We don't have to ask them.
We don't have to vet them.
We don't have to ask them about their religion and how it applies, how it relates to the American way or the Western way.
We don't have to ask them anything.
And this is why they don't know.
And you saw this yesterday in a beautiful, beautiful moment when the electors confirmed the election of Donald Trump.
You saw the separation between the chattering classes who have been hysterical.
Paul Krugman is screaming, the Republic is over.
Everybody, the Electoral College has to go.
Fake news, it's all Russians.
The Russians are coming.
The Russians are coming.
All this screaming.
The electors just went out in every state, they did their job.
Here in Texas is the vote, the final vote, as the Texas electors put Donald Trump over the top.
Our votes for president have been tallied.
We have for president, Donald Trump, 36 votes.
For Ron Paul, one vote.
And for John Kasich, one vote.
by the way texas now puts president trump over the top so now people start to stand up if you can't see if you're just listening People start to stand up and the applause goes on and on and on.
If you saw the speaker, the lady who was speaking, the idea that she's participating in this democratic moment, this American moment, she's so proud, she's so lit up, and these people are standing up, and all the people at the New York Times are dumping their heads in acid while they're going insane while they're exploding.
Here is a protester in Wisconsin who caught the bug.
She caught the media bug and she went nuts as the Wisconsin electors were voting.
And here she is shouting while the electors shout back, shame, shame, shame.
Everyone is here to put that.
You don't deserve to be an America.
You were the World War II.
My America.
Take me out if you must.
This is my America.
You saw us out.
All of it!
Can I take my things?
Sweet things!
That is my hope!
Take me out.
I don't care.
I love the thing about the coat.
Take me out.
She wants to be carried out.
She's playing to the press.
She wants me to take me out.
And could I have my coat, please?
And take me out.
And I want my coat.
But you know, this is a woman who has caught the bug of the chattering classes.
And while the electors are dutifully going about their business of ratifying the will of the people, she's insane.
She's gone nuts because she feels something terrible has happened.
And there is so far, thank God, no evidence that that is in any way the case.
You know, it's like there's just no evidence that something terrible has happened.
This, you know, something different has happened.
Something, look, something fell apart, has fallen apart over the last couple of years.
And the right didn't see it and the left didn't see it.
The cultural consensus fell apart.
And it left a certain number of people in the dust.
And those people want to be heard and they want you to know that this is not working.
The argument, you know, you can't.
A guy without a job, without enough bread to eat, isn't free.
And you can't tell him the theory of freedom until he has enough bread to eat, until he has a job, until he has some dignity.
And nobody has been listening to this voice.
It's been going back and forth in theory and principle, all of which are important, but people's lives have to work.
Whatever your political theory is, it has to work first.
It has to make sure that people can eat and live and do the things that people do.
So this hysteria is like a virus caught by the press.
Now, I want you to listen.
This is a different place, but there were also protests here.
And remember, these electors have been hammered, hammered by thousands and thousands of emails and phone calls in the middle of the night telling them how awful they are and threatening them and all this stuff.
Here is an elector in Kansas listening to the protests there and then going ahead and casting her vote for Donald Trump.
I think that is the, that's being American.
So in the United States, because we have the freedom to be this great republic, you can speak your mind and not be reprimanded.
So I think everybody's right.
But we're voting an elector for Kansas is we're representing the 57% of the voters who came out on November 8th and they voted for Donald Trump.
So I think that we're just supporting the voters' voice of Kansas.
And you heard the calls in the gallery, people shouting shame after the vote went down.
What was your reaction to that?
Well, it's okay.
That's the beauty of being American.
You can have the First Amendment right.
You can say whatever you want and so on.
You're not hurting anybody physically.
So were you proud to vote for Mr. Trump today?
Yes, I am.
Yes, I am.
I'm looking forward to a great many things coming forward in the next four years for sure.
A gigantic kiss, big sloppy wet kiss on the head to this woman who like just deals with this with the tolerance, classic American tolerance and patience.
You have every right to protest, but I'm here to do a job.
I'm here to represent the people who sent me here and what they voted for, and I'm proud to do it.
And here with another voice, I just love this guy too in Pennsylvania, another elector.
He reacts to the Russian hack hysteria and all the protests that he's been getting.
Listen to this.
You know what I ask the question?
Why aren't people saying to John Peresta, why did you write stupid emails?
Why aren't people asking Donna Brazil, why did you do dumb things like giving questions to Hillary?
Why aren't people saying to Debbie Bosselman Schultz, in addition to being taken out as DNC chairman, why did you favor Clinton to Bernie Sanders?
Nobody's asking that question.
What do you think of the protests?
The pretty intense protests.
The protesters.
Protesters are nice people.
They have been given the wrong bill of goods that if you go and raise hell and do these things, people will change the world.
They don't understand us.
I told people I received over 70,000 emails.
I've received over 5,000 letters.
I've received over 500 phone calls at all times of day and night.
I told her, I'm not going to change my mind.
I received a letter from a seven-year-old child saying, I'm scared of Trump.
How can a 70-year-old child be scared of Trump?
What does he know about Trump?
I received a letter, a phone call from this lady.
She says, my father was a Holocaust survivor and I'm scared.
And she's crying.
Jenny, what do you want me to do?
Don't vote for Trump.
Give me a break.
I love this country.
I love this country so much.
The common sense, the down-to-earth, the tolerance in this guy.
The protesters are nice people, but what do you want me to do?
This is my job.
I'm doing my job here.
And here's the thing: 40 years ago, 40 years ago, 50, 40 years ago, that guy, that lady, they would have looked different.
They would have been white.
They would have been white.
They would have had names like, that guy's name was something like Ashkari or something.
They would have had names like Flanagan and, you know, Italian names, Jewish names, Swedish names, whatever.
They would have looked different.
But they would have said the same thing because it's about a triumph of a good idea.
The good idea of freedom, the good idea of limited government, the good idea that the people have a right to throw a curveball at the elites, to say to the elites, you know what?
Take a hike.
We're bringing in new blood.
We're bringing in new people.
That voice, this is why I so despise the alt-right with their pride and their pinkness.
You know, it's like there's nothing, there's nothing to be proud of in the color of your skin.
I mean, you know, look, I'll be having a nice complexion.
Good for you.
But it's like, that's not what we're doing here.
That's not, you know, and it's not sentimental.
There's nothing sentimental about it.
Those people represent the best of America as it has been since I was a boy.
And that they look different than they would have looked when I was a boy means absolutely nothing to me.
It means nothing to any of you.
You want to see racism?
You want to see what racism looks like today?
MTV put out a little video of what your New Year's resolution should be if you are a white male, okay?
This is what racism looks like today.
Hey, fellow white guys, it's about to be a new year.
And here's a few things we think you could do a little bit better in 2017.
First off, try to recognize that America was never great for anyone who wasn't a white guy.
Can we all just agree that Black Lives Matter isn't the opposite of all lives matter?
Black lives just matter.
There's no need to overcomplicate it.
Also, Blue Lives Matter isn't a thing.
Cops weren't born with blue skin, right?
I mean, yeah, they weren't born blue.
Stop bragging about being woke.
Stop saying woke.
Learn what mansplaining is and then stop doing it.
Oh, and if you're a judge, don't prioritize the well-being of an Ivy League athlete over the woman he assaulted.
We all love Beyoncé.
And yeah, she's black, so of course she cares about black issues.
I'm talking to you, Fox News.
Feel free to take Kanye West, though.
You guys can have him.
You know what you did, Kanye.
Nobody who has black friends says that they have black friends.
And just because you have black friends doesn't mean you're not racist.
You can be racist with black friends.
Look, guys, we know nobody's perfect.
But honestly, you could do a little better in 2017.
Some of you guys do a great job.
Some of you don't.
Please, because 2016 is bad.
2017 can't be worse than this, all right?
Because this is bad.
Now, let me mansplain something to these idiots.
You know, that's what racism looks like.
You know, you worry about the alt-right.
There's 200 alt-writers with 8 million Twitter feeds in the country.
They're disgusting.
I really do dislike them.
But that's the racism that I worry about because there's so many of them and it's being sold as a good thing.
That's how you sell.
That's how you sell poison to people.
You sell poison, mental poison to people by telling them it makes them good, by telling them it makes them virtuous.
Mythical Heroes 00:04:19
You know, they say that America was never great for people who weren't white men.
It was great for that lady, that elector in Kansas.
She's not a white man.
It was great for that guy in Pennsylvania.
He's not a white man.
It was plenty great for the people who grasped the idea and took responsibility for themselves.
It's the idea that made it great.
It was never the color of the people who came up with that idea, though God love them.
You know, who cares what color they were too, but God love them.
It was the people, it was the ideas.
The idea of rule by expert has failed.
The idea by rule of the people and the freedom of the individual has never failed.
It has never failed once.
It is a great idea, and it's great to see it's still alive.
I mean, that was really moving the way they just went about their business while the people at the New York Times heads were exploding.
It was a beautiful thing.
I mean, look, the heads of the New York Times exploding would be beautiful in and of itself, but it was made even more beautiful by America in action.
It was great stuff.
So I should do Rogue One.
I said I was going to do it.
I'll do it.
All right.
Everybody loved Rogue One but me, okay?
So I'm going to say it like it's obviously a more exciting film than I thought.
I was fighting to stay awake for the entire thing.
My problem with the Star Wars franchise, you know, people used to play Cowboys and Indians.
There's always, in every culture, there is a golden age for when men, and it's half legendary and half real.
When knights are in armor, when the samurais fight, when cowboys battle Indians, even World War II has become sort of a legendary age.
It's that moment when men can do violence on behalf of the good.
And the reason that resonates is it resonates with little boys who dream of being heroes.
And they want to be heroes for the right.
They want to fight.
They want to get out that male energy and fight, but they want to battle for the good.
And so if you're a cowboy, if you are a knight in shining armor, you're battling for the good.
And the wonderful thing about those legends, even though there's a lot of untruth in them, obviously, is the wonderful thing is it connects you to your culture.
When I was a kid and we played Cowboys and Indians, it connected you to the settling of the West and the rise of America.
That there are problems about the way that America was settled.
Yeah, that becomes part of the gray morality of adulthood, and you find that out later.
But it's still the right thing to stand for civilization over primitivism, to stand for the rise of America.
All those things were the right things to stand for.
Star Wars was different.
It was different in kind, and it changed the movie industry entirely, by the way.
But it changed the movie industry because it caught into a moment.
It was based on a lot of it, was based on the work of Joseph Campbell, wrote The Hero of Thousand Faces, very interesting guy, wrote about mythology.
It was meant to be a myth.
It was meant to be a myth that, as Joseph Campbell explains, you know, people go through myths that sort of show them where they are in life.
And this is the myth of choosing between one father and another, finding the violence within yourself represented by the Darth Vader father and finding the good creative masculine energy within yourself represented by Obi-Wan Kenobi and all this stuff.
It was built that way.
It was built specifically to be that way.
Myths end.
That journey ends.
The journey into manhood ends, and then you are a man, and then you start to deal with other issues.
That happens in cowboy stories.
Cowboy stories become very serious.
Even superhero stories have started to deal with the world as it is.
Batman has dealt with terrorism, and Superman and the Marvel guys are all dealing with how we live in a global world when we have so much power and all that stuff.
That's what the movies have been about.
For me, the Star Wars continues to be this myth that's over.
Like there's nothing more to say.
And so the stories can be good or bad, but they're just not very interesting.
I found this emotionally uninteresting.
And they keep plugging in, oh, well, now we'll do it with a black guy.
Now we'll do it with a female.
This is if that makes a difference.
To me, it's just completely empty.
It has just been completely emptied out.
So listen, everybody else liked it.
Go see it.
It'll make a million dollars.
I just found it very cynical.
I find the Star Wars universe very boring.
I don't know who any of the aliens are except the Ewoks.
They're the only ones that I ever had a.
You know, if they were telling extra stories about the Lord of the Rings people, which is also a myth, it would be a little different because that world is so thought out and creative.
The world of Harry Potter, same thing, so thought out and creative.
This is a very, you know, anodyne world.
Just a lot of different planets where people look different and shoot at each other.
And I just don't find it very interesting.
Rose Growing Out Of Jesse's Branch 00:02:21
So there I am.
I know.
I'm alone.
I just want to say I'm in a room with other guys.
Every single one of them thinks I'm wrong.
So go see the movie, and I hope you enjoy it.
But that was just my take on it.
All right.
To end on a Christmas carol, stuff I like.
Lo, how a rose air blooming, one of my favorites, a 17th century German hymn that is based on a prophecy in Isaiah, there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse.
Jesse was David's father, so it's saying, there will come forth a branch, shall grow out of his roots.
There will come forth a child of the line of King David, who Christians take to be Jesus.
And so this is a hymn about the rose growing out of the branch of Jesse.
Lo, how a rose air blooming from tender stem hath sprung of Jesse's lineage coming as men of old have sung.
It came a flower bright amid the cold of winter when half spent was the night.
Isaiah, twas, foretold it, this rose that I have in mind, and with Mary we behold it, the virgin mother so sweet and so kind, to show God's love aright.
She bore to men a Savior when half spent was the night.
Beautiful stuff.
It's a beautiful, beautiful piece of work.
It's been sung by everybody.
Sting did it.
Mannheim Steamroller did it.
We will be back tomorrow to have the mailbag.
Send in your questions, please, and we will answer them all and improve your life immensely before Christmas even comes.
But for now, we have to say goodbye.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
It came of flow and bright amid the cloud of wind spent those night.
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