Posts Tagged ‘Democrat Party
Waking Sleeping Beauty
We highly recommend going to see Waking Sleeping Beauty, a documentary about Walt Disney Animation in its darkest days (the abysmal Black Cauldron) through its renaissance and creative zenith in the mid-90s.
It’s fascinating for a great many reasons.
(1) We love the classic Disney fairytales, even when they are complete misses like Princess & the Frog or weird mashups of fairytales and real-life or literary stories, like Pocahontas and Hunchback of Notre Dame. We’ll see every Disney animated movie, at least once — but only repeatedly watch the best of them, like Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, and Beauty & the Beast. All it takes, honestly, to start the waterworks is the merest hint of “Tale As Old As Time”, sung by either Angela Lansbury or Celine Dion. And someday we all hope to earn an epitaph as perfectly poetic as Howard Ashman’s, “the man who gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul”. To see how Ashman was brought into Disney to bring that voice and soul to projects was an incredible treat.
(2) We remember seeing The Black Cauldron in theaters and thinking how terrible it was. It was the first time in any of our lives that we saw people actually get up and leave the theater and not stay until the end credits (which some of our mothers always made us watch to the very end, because people worked hard on the film and it was disrespectful not to see their acknowledgments). That movie was just terrible. In Waking Sleeping Beauty, we learned it made less than The Care Bears Movie at the box office — and that movie was bad, too. Though we still love us some care bears.
(3) It was amazing to see what a simple ragtag operation Disney Animation was, even when creating Little Mermaid and Beauty & the Beast. Sure, they had studio millions behind them, but the core of everything done was just a group of oddballs and misfits working hard at what they loved, creating magic. We found that truly inspiring — and hope others watching the movie realize that they, too, can create magic like that if they set their minds to it, work hard, and never give up no matter what the challenges are.
(4) The movie briefly touched on the episode where corporate raiders tried to take down Disney and sell it off into constituent parts in the 80s, the way Richard Gere’s character in Pretty Woman used to take apart companies, break them up, and make more from their destruction than he would have running them. Years ago, we read a book called something like Raiding the Magic Kingdom, all about this episode. The movie doesn’t go that deeply into the “greenmailing” that went on, but a Jewish New York corporate raider came dangerously close to destroying Disney for profit — in the book, it’s noted one of the only things that stopped him was the Jewish community, who refused to allow this man to take down Disney because it was an American institution and they were afraid of a massive backlash against Jews everywhere for destroying part of Americana. So, instead, that corporate raider “greenmailed” Disney into buying back all his shares at a huge profit to himself, lest he bring the whole company down.
(5) It’s amazing how much the personalities of the executives, and their interactions with one another, impacted the company.
We’ve said many times before that the entertainment industry is a great deal like politics. These movies showing the behind the scenes of a movie studio make us think about all the behind the scenes in Congress, campaigns, and the White House. It’s fascinating to watch archival footage of Disney executives insisting Pocahontas was going to be a massive hit, while The Lion King was sure to be a mediocre success. Those fools also believe The Black Cauldron would be the greatest Disney film of all time.
In retrospect, all of these bad decisions are easy to spot, and hindsight is 20/20.
We can’t help thinking about the Democrat Party in this way, and looking at everything they have done to produce their own Black Cauldron with this Obamacare bill. Every time we read another propaganda piece in the NY Times or TIME claiming this will help Democrats in November, we’re going to remember all of those suits at Disney who deluded themselves to believe some of their worst films were going to be their biggest successes.
In Waking Sleeping Beauty, it was clear the amount of time and energy invested in bad ideas became too great for anyone to put the brakes on these projects and let cooler, saner heads prevail. They set themselves on a course to destruction, investing everything in bad ideas, and the structure of the company and all its employees just wouldn’t allow them to change direction mid-course to avert the disaster we in the audience knew was coming.
That’s so similar to what we feel today, watching the reality of Obamacare set in.
America will be okay in the end, because the coming elections and court challenges will see to it that this madness is put in check — but the Democrat Party will never recover from what it’s done to itself.
Just as Disney’s self-inflicted wounds and myopia almost did it in more than a few times.
Winning the lottery, then losing everything
Today, as we think about what Leftists shoved through Congress yesterday, and how giddy the Red Queen Nancy Pelosi seemed carrying that giant gavel across the Capitol grounds on her way to pound the Constitution to pulp, we’re reminded of growing up in Cleveland and watching so many people obsess over winning the lottery.
Some of us here had parents who talked about nothing else, it seemed, other than winning the lottery…or the church raffle…or the March Madness pool…or the Super Bowl tontine…whatever. Every week, there was something to gamble away money they didn’t have on, with the insane hope that all of their problems would be solved IF ONLY THEY WON.
Well, in grade school, one of our classmates’ father won a jackpot from the Ohio Lottery.
We never were clear on how much it was, but by Cleveland standards it was sizable — large enough for the guy to pull his kid out of our little Catholic school and move way out into the suburbs, into a big McMansion he had built and decorated with as many expensive toys as possible. By the time sixth grade started, we’d lost all track of the kid, seeing as he now attended a very expensive prep school deep in the woods in a much fancier part of town.
By the time we started high school, we heard things didn’t end up working out so well for that lottery-winning family.
Turns out the man who built the big McMansion didn’t realize he had to pay property taxes on it every year. Since he quit his job when he won the jackpot that was supposed to solve all his problems, it didn’t occur to him that he’d need an income other than the lottery winnings to pay things like his taxes, or to prepare him for the day when he’d burned through all the cash he was given in that lump sum from the state.
In the end, the guy had to sell off most of the expensive things he bought, at a big loss. His son never liked the prep school, didn’t do well there, and ended up having problems with alcohol and drugs after he was forced into Cleveland Public high school when his dad no longer had tuition money. The lottery winner’s wife left him after the roller coaster to bankruptcy the lottery winnings sent them on.
Broke, the man who thought the lottery would solve all his problems ended up having to move in with his elderly mother, in a cramped two bedroom shack of a house in a deteriorating Cleveland neighborhood, worse off than where he was in life before his “big win”.
That’s a pretty common story, in terms of what happens to lottery winners, from what we understand.
It’s also exactly what we think is going to happen to the Democrat Party in the months and years ahead.
Yesterday was it for us in terms of Democrats.
We have actively worked against the Democrat Party since May 31st, 2008 when it was clear to us at the Rules & Bylaws Committee Meeting that the party had been hijacked by far-left whackadoodles, and that the DNC was taken over by a radical coup. That’s when the Democrat Party stopped being the Democrat Party we grew up with and knew.
But, up until yesterday, we believed there was a chance we could take back the party from the Left and restore it to a moderate/centrist orbit, where we think the party belongs. This is a right of center nation. We’re conservative Democrats. Centrists. Our political bearings formed in the mid-90s, when the Clintons took the Democrats to the middle and kept them there with the help of the DLC for a good 15 years.
It was decided in 2008, by Howard Dean, Donna Brazile, and others in the DNC and Congress, to push moderates, conservatives, and centrists out of the party and shift Democrats to the far left. While we hoped, through hard work and the consequences of electoral defeat in the upcoming contests, that the Democrats could be brought back to the center, today we realize they are just like that lottery winner from our childhood.
Yesterday, Democrats think they hit the jackpot — they finally got that monster of a bill passed, chock full of all sorts of unconstitutional, illegal, oppressive, socialist measures. They popped the champagne and shook their fannies all over Washington, we’re sure.
Here in Chicago, we soberly realized there is no place in the Democrat Party for moderates, conservatives, or centrists. The Democrat Party is a Leftist party only now. If there were moderates and conservatives truly on the blue side of the aisle, they would never have allowed a bill like that to be passed. This was not how healthcare reform should have been done — with all the bribes, the unconstitutional mandates, the overreach of federal authority, and the Orwellian elevation of the Health & Human Services Secretary into an arbitrator of life and death for millions of Americans.
We don’t see how a center-right nation embraces Democrats after this…not when Democrats have proven themselves to be so reckless, so Marxist, so un-American.
We also don’t see how the party can ever be brought back from the Left now.
There is just no going back possible.
After all the spending sprees are over, and all the champagne runs out, perhaps Democrats will realize their folly — just like that man who won the lottery but ended up losing everything because of it. There was no going back for him, either. He had a decent, normal life with a good job and a stable family — and he threw that all away when he thought he hit it rich and was thrust into the decadent Big Time, where he had everything his heart desired at the moment…except the good sense to realize getting everything he wanted in that moment was going to cost him everything he had in the end.
Democrats might think they won their big lottery yesterday…but we believe they’re going to lose everything, and will probably not exist as a major political party 10 years from now as a result.
