The recent controversies over politically correct rewrites of James Bond novels and Roald Dahl’s children’s books highlights just how dependent a woke culture industry is on the works of dead white men, like Dahl, Fleming and Tolkien, who were anything but politically correct.
Or even living, but currently politically incorrect white women, like J.K. Rowling.
Woke culture has filled every school with graphic sexual books like Beyond Magenta and Lawn Boy which describe 8 and 10-year-olds having sex, but can’t generate any of its own classics. That’s why Netflix bought the Roald Dahl Story Company for $686 million, Amazon paid $8.5 billion for MGM, whose crown jewel is James Bond, and has spent over $1 billion to make its own woke version of Tolkien’s mythos. (New woke Lord of the Ring movies are also coming.)
Disney built an empire churning out woke versions of everything from Marvel comics to its own classic cartoons, including Peter Pan and Pinnochio, and other works by dead white men. The rest of the culture industry is frantically trying to conglomerate and amass enough intellectual property of its own to also cannibalize, denounce, bowdlerize and then cash in on every year.
Woke culture is the parasitism of the creatively untalented and politically authoritarian. It runs on monopolies reprocessing the works of all the retroactively canceled talented artists and writers, blending the splendid feasts of the past into differently branded cans of woke cultural spam.
The massive intellectual properties that serve as the profit engines for woke companies are the works of the unwoke. And the woke haven’t figured out how to replace them. Boycott efforts of Hogwarts Legacy, a new Harry Potter game, failed miserably with sales currently approaching $1 billion, despite a systemic campaign of intimidation and reviews condemning the author.
What’s the woke counter to Harry Potter? Mr. Felker-Martin’s ‘Manhunt’: a transgender fantasy novel that kills off Rowling. All the men in ‘Manhunt’ turn into zombies, and the trannies hunt them down along with the feminist ‘TERFs’ who refuse to believe that they’re women. Despite heavy promotion by the media and its publisher, Tor, it currently ranks in 40,382th place.
Woke culture industries are busy rewriting and censoring the works of Fleming, Dahl, Tolkien, and for that matter Dr. Seuss, who was a liberal stalwart of his day, because they can’t equal them or even come close to doing so. There’s even a “diverse” and “inclusive” rewrite of Shakespeare. Unable to create their own work, they’re reduced to censoring classics.
Totalitarian leftist regimes have a history of this sort of thing. Both the Soviet Union and Communist China removed any mention of the bible from Robinson Crusoe. Still unsatisfied with the result, Soviet censors rewrote Crusoe more broadly to emphasize that individuals need to be part of a collective society. Woke rewrites are not a new idea and reflect the same issue.
“Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime,” Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart had argued. Woke culture has no confidence. Like most censors, it is incapable of creating, only destroying because it is wholly political. It is no coincidence that the works it is obsessed with possessing and destroying are mostly imaginative creations, fantasies and escapist wish-fulfillment, that it both desires and hates. “I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories,” Tolkien wrote. “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?”
Political censorship pursues and subverts escapism in particular because it offers a measure of freedom in a society whose culture controllers have turned it into one giant political prison. It’s no wonder that they are unable to duplicate the appeal of works that were genuinely subversive or escapist and otherwise free. Wokeness can appropriate free culture, but never duplicate it.
The Left is subversive only when it comes to undermining existing power structures not under its control. In any area where it seizes power, it ceases to be subversive and becomes authoritarian because its subversiveness was never aimed at seeking freedom, only power. Once that power is achieved, subversive creativity becomes authoritarian censorship.
When the Left’s grip on the culture became total, it ceased to produce, to publish or to even think subversively. Its idea of subversion, in fiction or in comedy, is, like ‘Manhunt’ or SNL, limited to the humiliation and destruction of enemies. And that’s no different than North Korean propaganda. That is why cultural wokeness produces nothing that lasts more than the moment. Rooted in the politics of the moment and the neurosis of the elites, overshadowed by fear and rewarding political commitment and artistic mediocrity, it serves only when nothing better exists.
Unfortunately the remnants of a better culture are all around us. That’s why they have to be censored or banned as reminders of what we have lost and how worthless our pottage is.
Wokeness, like most rigid ideologies, poisons creativity. A decade ago, the New York Times explored Chinese frustration over America’s ability to make movies they could not. “A movie like ‘Kung Fu Panda’ could have been produced only in an atmosphere of cultural and artistic freedom that China doesn’t enjoy,” the paper suggested. America has a whole lot less cultural and artistic freedom in 2023 than we did in 2008. And our cultural offerings, like China’s, now reek of formulaic propaganda made by third-rate mediocrities with the right political standing.
Censors have the right politics, but no creativity. Their rewrites, remakes and reinventions are tiresome. This has been the apolitical criticism of woke reinventions like Paramount+’s Star Trek Discovery or Amazon’s Rings of Power. Invention requires vision, but the woke vision is directed at taking over. Once they’ve seized power, the vision ends and the tedious conformity begins. That’s why woke culture is politically regimented, yet creatively disordered. The censors are up to date on the number of minorities who have to be in every scene or chapter, but no notion of pacing or rhythm. Their creations have nowhere to go because they have already arrived. Utopians have no concept of the past or the future, only the crushing mandates of the present.
History, to the woke censors, is a litany of the failures of the past while the future will be an even more glorious xerox of the present with no further dissent, opposition or even questions. And yet it is that very past that holds the treasures of imagination, art and ideas that they appropriate. The world as it was before their politics took hold and crushed the life out of it, leaving behind cultural deserts of black glass, still speaks with untold clarity, wonder and freedom. They try to leave it behind, to remake it in their own image and to denounce it, and yet it calls to them.
Censors have no creativity and therefore no culture. Despite woke claims that they love diversity, what they actually want is sameness in thought, in speech and in all things. When they censor, they try to make works that were once very different feel the same. Stories that moved millions are reduced to intellectual property, to brands, styles and costumes, and then swapped interchangeably in the same handful of plots that can only ever add up to one thing.
The story must be subversive of the enemies of the system while upholding the virtue of the system. The tastes and values of the elites must be flattered while those of the enemies must be exposed. Stories have been made out of such crude material since time immemorial, but works that have genuine subversive energy do different things. They break free of the political formulas and ridicule the censors. And that no authoritarian cultural oligarchy will allow.
Our woke cultural industries, like those of Orwell’s 1984, are concerned with rendering any such dissent unpublishable or unfilmable, while rewriting the past to conform to the present. But this only draws people more strongly to the original creative works of the past. America is becoming Soviet Russia and Communist China. And just as Russians and Chinese were drawn to American movies because they tasted of freedom, so westerners are drawn to their own past.
As America was to the citizens of Communist nations, the past has become to us, a land of wonders where great dreams were possible, that we may reach for, but never touch. The more Soviet citizens reached for America, the more the Communist leadership counteracted the appeal with stories of the horrors of capitalist life, racist lynchings, poverty and violence. Our own Communist leaders now tell us the same horror stories about the past. They fear the past.
And they should.
Cant get over the fact that Western Culture is what made America and the civilized word back when Jessie Jackson was trying to get Western Culture banned or replaced with Liberal Culture
Almost poetic Daniel.
Unlike the woke nonsense.
I watched a UK tv show with my grandchildren this weekend called Dancing on Ice. It was the final with three couples competing. Guess what? Miraculously a trans was in the final despite falling in the semifinals.
The drag queen’s routine was tedious but the judges said “You made difficult moves look easy”
Someone somewhere was denied their justified opportunity so this bull can be broadcast to us.
It’s nothing but a propaganda machine designed to confuse our children and made by perverts.
With zero prompting from me the kids rejected the trans thing.
Yes, another brilliant essay from Daniel.
There was a time when propaganda was added in, now it’s propaganda at the root which makes the end product into garbage.
Destroy everything just to gain power. And then what? A wasteland of tribal hatreds and violence
This is not going to end well.
The can’t create anything beneficial, but figured out how to create a self-feeding extortion loop worth billions thru guilt trips, social media shaming and threats of urban violence.
And I’m trying to get ChatGPT to admit this… It’s logical, it will figure it out soon.
AI is a grammatically correct tool of leftist tyrants. Woke garbage in, woke out. Annoyingly, it writes much better than I do. But its didactic leftism is soulless and its ‘logic’ is therefore circular. It ultimately is illogical yet not with the added mystery of human emotion.
Sorta like Gerge Orwell naming the group of public officials which would be summoned to perform the task of burning books….. FIREMEN. Every little kid’s hero, the fireman was.
He was one brilliant man, long with Ken Kesey
The Left creates nothing. Just as Marx instructed his followers to “ruthlessly criticize all that exists,” it is great at finding (and complaining about) imperfections in an imperfect world, but at building or creating anything worthwhile, not so much.
You hit the nail on the head, the left ONLY knows how to destruct, absolutely nothing about building.
Just like Satan.
ruthlessly criticise all that exists
I learned that about Marx from one of the few who really understood him..Herbert Mrcuse. And I learned how to ruthlessly criticise KARL MARX at the same time.
Fun!!!
Well, Marx was an awful person, after all.
And then rule over the wasteland while trying to force everyone to conform to it. The more reality fails to live up to the theories, the worse the brutality gets, much as in the USSR, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, etc
Many would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. Unfortunately when they create a hell they find that they are not rulers or even servants, but rather just so much mulch. By then it’s too late, and we of course will n0t survive to see it. Better to be in the next world with the real Ruler than see that happen.
Excellent point. The Wokie culture is artificial, based on false premises (not least Freud’s theories about sexuality, etc. That has been highly misleading to the youth, who are tricked by nature into being desperately focused on sex.) The culture that is being destroyed was based on reality, which is why I enjoy so much reading the older histories, which tried to depict reality truthfully. Who was it who started that approach to history, Thucydides?
I would not take Thucydides or any of the classical historians too seriously. They wrote what sounded right and pleased their paymasters.
Paste. You will have seen on 60 Minutes, 5 times. Academy Award nomination. Art?
a great inspiration for all who feel hard done by…. amazing woman
Wokeism really hits a sour note when it fiddles with the results of the creative process, the very soul of the artist.
And that’s one of wokeism’s goals – to negate not only the soul, but the artistic soul, which is the hardest to negate because that soul exists to express a spiritual unity with creation.
What a word – wokeism.
I think that for what it is, wokeism is a misnomer. It’s cultism. It’s…….. wackism.
It’s the Emporer’s-New-Clothes-ism. It’s in-your-face-literally-and-figuratively-ism.
It is designed to deconstruct.
Like a geometric proof, this smokescreen-ism marches on to “a new world order”.
We delude ourselves into thinking the world is civilized. Civilized. Really?! Maybe that’s the rope woke uses for us to hang ourselves.
Fight back. Search your souls and connect with the universe!
“Woke” is a new word for it. Evil constantly repackages itself in new words, using the garb of reason, half truths and the promise of good. But it is the same old lie.
I believe the greatest power of evil is deception. Satan appears as an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14). If evil could give us peace, we would be without hope. Drugs numb pain and so approximate peace with nepenthe. But for most of us, deception is the best strategy.
Satan told Eve that God is a liar, that she would not die, but be like God Himself, knowing good and evil (Genesis 3:4-5). When Adam and Eve eat the forbidden apple, their “eyes were opened” (Genesis 3:7). Is that not a perfect description of WOKE?
All of what Satan said to Eve had some truth in it except the part about God being a liar. God calls this “rebellion,” not “woke.” Woke is the oldest trick in the book.
I love your comment because it plays with language as leftist do not allow, of course. Some years back, in NYC there was a big colorful graffiti wall (I think it was painted as graffiti) one saw when driving by that said “Crack is Wack”
I am thinking “Woke is Wack” would make a good graffiti wall. The “Emperor’s new clothes” ’story should be talk to every child so they can clearly seen the man in women’s clothes for who he is and who he would be without the appropriation of silly exaggerated female clothes and makeup.
So many naked emperors, so little time remaining to correct this. .
The Left doesn’t believe in the soul. Or individuality.
The core premise is that all people are interchangeable and can be distilled into a collective mass, that given the same upbringing, you or I would be the same person.
There’s no room for creativity there.
Yet perversely the Left appeals to many creative types because of personal egoism and love the idea of remaking society in their own image until they see the writing on the wall.
You come real close but don’t come right out and declare that “woke” is Communism-Fascism.
“America is becoming Soviet Russia and Communist China.”
“Our woke cultural industries, like those of Orwell’s 1984,…”
“Becoming?—-“Like?”….It’s here.
Totalitarianism has arrived in America and it’s the Democrat Communist Party and their MSM Pravda.
This isn’t as bad as it gets.
If the Left gets absolute power, this would be something we’d look back on with nostalgia.
The Democrat Communists have a pretty good stranglehold on America now; when it becomes “absolute” then it’s too late. Time to expose Commies and their propaganda is now and to stop using cutesy, benign euphemisms like “woke.” What is woke? It represents the subversion of everything that America stands for. Actually I think conservatives are afraid to label Democrats as Communists for fear of a “McCarthyism” backlash. But it’s OK for Democrat Commies to call conservatives White supremacists, Nazis, semi-fascists and MAGA domestic terrorists.
It’s so bizarre to hear Conservatives stupidly refer to the Commies’ Censorship and “Cancel Culture” as akin to “McCarthyism.” Wow…they just don’t get it. We are getting smacked in the face with real Communist censorship of free speech and conservatives stupidly compare that to Sen. Joe McCarthy and HUAC.
Please set them strait and sound the alarm before it’s too late. Write an article: Wokeism is (Progressive) Communism.
Yu imply that “they” have won and are in total control. I can’t vouch for you but I personally heartily reject this premise, with large doses of ridicule. “They” like to THINK they have taken over, utterly subverting our culture. Hasn’t happened yet, despite their attestations to the contrary, and won’t heppen at all is my prediction.
Consider how often we see the wokies being ridiculed, thwarted, humiliated, taken out, exposed as the gaggle of ugly putative emperors “sin ropas”. and carrying on as if all were just so hunky dory…….
Some will weary of the fraud, some will find something better, others will be so scorned tey will leave the schtick, and a fair number have, of late, been exposed as they’ve been arrested and charged with heinous crimes, which has the twin benefits of taking them out of action and disillusioning others who had highly respected them.
Don’t buy their rope. And whenever you find it, burn it.
Most importantly, connect with the Creator of the Universe. That’s a sure way to joy that nobody can take away from you.
The wokesters are demanding “re-writes” for whom? The older generation? What for? Certainly not the younger generation who don’t read books. — once they finish Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, the only book they look at is their phone.
Any idiot can destroy, it takes, at minimum, persistence to preserve and effort to build. Editors work for writers, not the other way around. In a world with no writers, editors starve. Hubris causes editors who cannot imagine that a subsequent editor will follow along behind them, sweeping even the prior editor’s existence out of the story. It takes a “useful idiot” to edit against their writer, they edit for a different master. If only “useful idiots” were actually valuable as more than mere implements of destruction and cannon fodder?
In an ideal world.
We live in a world where the marketplace is controlled by Amazon and a handful of publishers who act as gatekeepers. Authors who self-publish have to force their way through social media gatekeepers including Big Tech.
The outstanding fact is that unless cultural committment precedes, and supercedes profit motive, then there is no culture at all…
Conservatives, if any exist today, are, as to externals, trapped between Globalists whose only real motive is superior profit and elitism in service of the permanence thereof, and Cultural Marxists whose motivation is cultural control in service of enforced normalization of godless perversity at every level…
Capitalism is too broad a term to be adequately descriptive in practice. There are innumerable characterzations of national economics that pass as capitalism, and it is the differences that matter most…
Unless we recover sufficient internal committment to a broad but cohesive Judeo-Christian, Western Civilization, foundational ethos which both actively limits what we will tolerate–Limits!–and actually, and in fact, motivates our economic choices both as to production and consumption–there is no alternative way to defeat the left and regain conservative cultural centrality…
Men without balls.
Women unhinged from their true identity.
Teachers without conscience.
Strike 1, Strike 2, Strike 3
Wokeism, is an abortion performed on living people after they have entered the realm of political anarchy. Destruction is their only goal, they figure someone else will rebuild for them. But, who? there is no one on the left who knows how to build, only destroy.
The Left thinks it’s building when it’s destroying.
That sums up its politics and its creative ventures. And all it ends up having to offer.
Mediocrity abhors genius and will do all it can to destroy it.
Mediocrity ought to appreciate and rejoice in genius. That’s the way it should be.
Thanks for this Daniel. So on the money. As a white, mature, hetero theater artist/independent filmmaker in NY I’m a member of an oppressed minority. But I just wanted to point out that some of us have not drunk the koolaid and still try to do one for the Gipper re: I did a rewrite of ‘J.C. and Antony and Cleopatra’ which was not PC just a re-examination of that narrative where a seasoned general (Antony) was defeated by an inexperienced young guy but who had powerful friends. So since the Romans were the O.G.s of history I thought it was valid to couch it in lingo that Tony Soprano would feel at home in. calling it ‘The Assassination of J. Kaisaar and the Rise of Augusto ( the Sopranos meet Mad Max) and setting it in a vaguely U.S. landscape after WWIII. As it turns out if just one ‘Best Sci-Fi Feature Film’ in The Golden State Film Festival. The link: https://youtu.be/tKk1tqyrDeU
and it covers the transition from republic to dictatorship which I think is on people’s minds.
Keep up the gd work. So impt.
Stephan Morrow
Art Dir
The Grt Am Play Series
that sounds really interesting, thank you for continuing to swim against the current, that’s where art comes from after all
3 R’s because some kids are stupid and they will need all 12 years to master the basics thoroughly. GET THE SOCIAL POLITICS OUT OF THE SCHOOL HOUSE. K12 sucks
How strange it appears that those who claim to be Woke actually appear to me to be sound asleep.
Madness takes its Toll.