At the Box Office and Voting Booth, Leftist Fantasies Bomb By Andrew Klavan
https://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/box-office-voting-booth-leftist-fantasies-bomb/
Early on in a life spent studying the art of storytelling, I came upon an interesting example of narrative power. In his encyclopedic study of mythology, The Masks of God, Joseph Campbell quotes an essay by German ethnologist Leo Frobenius. Frobenius tells of a little girl who plays with three matchsticks, pretending they are Hansel, Gretel and the witch. After a time, she lets out a shriek of terror. When her father asks her what’s the matter, she replies, “Daddy! Daddy! Take the witch away!” In her imagination, the matchstick has become the witch she pretended it was.
Something similar has happened to the Democratic Party and its communications arm, by which I mean so-called journalists and Hollywood entertainers. They have convinced themselves that their duty to defeat the demonic evil of Donald Trump overrides their obligations to do their various jobs. Instead of governing, informing and entertaining us, they have spun out a fairy tale of heroic resistance against authoritarian wickedness, conspiracy and corruption. And now, like the little girl in the anecdote, they are shrieking in terror because they believe Donald Trump is what they pretended he is instead of what he is in fact.
What is the president, in fact? Well, without dabbling in psychology or mind-reading — that is, judging only by what we know of his presidential record so far — he seems to be a run-of-the mill conservative Republican who is getting quite a lot done. Oh, and he has an obstreperous personality and a big mouth.
Because most people live in something vaguely resembling the real world, the disparity between the left’s hysteria — their imaginings of Russian conspiracy, of Gestapo governance, of abusive power — and the facts of Trump’s actual presidency — tax cuts, regulation rollbacks, Constitutional judges and the occasional unruly tweet — makes the self-serious emergency activism of the “resistance” seem like a child’s game, a silly fantasy.
And so, instead of the hero’s welcome the left always seems to be expecting, the people keep giving them the bum’s rush.
Weepy former man Jimmy Kimmel acknowledged as much in his opening monologue at the Oscars, “Of the nine best picture nominees only two of them made more than a hundred million dollars. But that’s not the point. We don’t make films like Call me By Your Name for money. We make them to upset Mike Pence.”
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