The King, the Pirate and the Nomenklatura

"Oh, there are cracks in the road we laid

But where the temple fell
The secrets have gone mad
This is nothing new
But when we killed it all
The hate was all we had"

 

Slipknot - Psychosocial

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"'Pravda' doesn't mean 'truth.' Pravda means whatever serves the world Communist revolution."

Robert A. Heinlein - The Future Revisited (1961)

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One of my various surreal encounters with a feminist professor was prompted by her using the word "patriarchy" to condemn a hypothetical situation of a family being dragged down by a grandmother's leadership. I pointed out that "pater"-"archos", father rule, does not inconceive whatever she thinks it inconceives, and was racking my brain trying to remember the correct anthropological context for elder male figureheads. Luckily she pre-empted any embarrassment due to ignorance on my part... by indignantly declaring that, no "in my classroom patriarchy is any system where men and women have different roles" and that sure as hell shut me up. I never knew being an assistant professor at a backwoods state university empowers one to simply redefine all language with the confidence of a fourth grader playing Scrabble. She sure kwyjibo-ed herself out of that mess!

Ah, screw it. I don't want to ruin my mood today by talking about feminism. I just did a page on it last week. Let's watch a movie instead.

The King is... well, it's about one of Shakespeare's various kings, which I've never read aside from Dickie Tres. This one's about Hank the count-your-fingers (fun fact: he eventually shat himself to death) and his swaggering embarrassment of a friend Falstaff, one of the Immortal Bard's more celebrated characters... and that's saying something. Good flick all told, albeit woefully misrepresenting the source material if you believe the history and literature departments. They didn't even do that one speech. Still, good acting (man, I have got to see that new Dune adaptation) and costumes, lovely cinematography, and manages to truly own its dramatic pauses. It does carry obvious hints of riding Game of Thrones' coat-tails, including making the Dauphin into a cackling cartoon villain worthy of the Lannisters or Targaryens. But, this same approach lends the various battle scenes a welcome realistic lurch and crunch. Overall though, you're still better off watching The Hollow Crown.

 

Then, after two hours of men butchering each other in tribal territorial contests, enter a princess the better to browbeat them.

Ah, crap.

You idiots are just trying to push me toward antifeminism, aren't you? Fine.

Skimming the original play reveals Katharine's part stretched only as far as some weak comic relief filler about awkwardly negotiating a bilingual handjob. Reimagined here, she's a purse-lipped, contemptuous moralist openly mocking both her dead brother and his killer her bethrothed in flawless English, plus her father the madman for good measure. In the original script she laid it on even thicker: "My father is old and tired and he no longer has the will to fight. But I am young and I have that will in abundance." She's also prescient about the Hundred Years' War's eventual outcome (remember, according to feminists women have "different ways of knowing") and spouts anachronistic lines like "all monarchy is illegitimate" in 1400, two hundred years before even open revolutionaries would work their way up to mere parliamentarians. And of course it's only her input which allows Hal to unveil the mastermind who led him into declaring an unjust war.

Note this femtastic denouement is doubly gratuitous. For one, the movie already included a nearly identical scene of Hal being warned about court intrigue by his sister, who did not display the same sneering condemnation. For another, it's not as though Shakes couldn't have written Kate as a righteous, bitter, incisive spitfire if he'd wanted to. Ol' Mags in Richard III fills that role quite nicely. No, the real issue is that in order to sell today, the script absolutely needed to climax (pun very much intended) with a scene of a(ny) woman openly bashing a(ny) man as "vain" "foolish" "easily riled" "easily beguiled" and scorning his accomplishments. The fact she calls him "young" might seem odd given the actors look about the same age... until you find the historical Catherine of Valois was in fact fifteen years younger than the historical Henry. Given the movie's a nonstop cavalcade of misrepresentations and blatant lies from start to fin, casting the future Muad'dib as Henry was motivated by standard Hollywood prettiness, but don't imagine if they'd cast an older actor they would've missed the opportunity for Catherine to lambaste him as a washed-up geezer. Every detail is yet another opportunity to tack on one more insult to the openly anti-male diatribe serving as pay-off to two hours of male suffering. Just as with video game examples described in other posts, the real point is to hammer home the righteousness of female supremacism by juxtaposing a positive female with negative males. Oh, that poor angelic, brilliant young Katey, beset on all sides by her husband's rashness and gullibility, her father's insanity, her brother's sadism, her screenwriters' utter indifference to fairness or reason...

 

See, that's the problem with me not wanting to talk about FEMale chauvINISM. There is no modern creative field which has not been utterly, mortally suffused with anti-male vitriol. No books, movies, serials or games. Nothing is written, acted or doodled today but it is immediately repurposed to openly abuse men somehow, to say nothing of rewriting older works like The Lord of the Rings as propaganda for female superiority and entitlement.

Which brings us back to Heinlein's description of he and his wife's visit to the USSR.

 

"Mrs. Heinlein told [other tourists] that we were now going to Vilno and in answer to more questions, she explained that Vilno was the capital of Lithuania, one of the Baltic republics taken over by the U.S.S.R. about twenty years earlier. A Russian translator, a young woman about twenty-three, was in the waiting room some distance away; she overheard this - and rushed over and butted in. With shrill indignation she informed us and the others that Mrs. Heinlein was lying - that Lithuania had always been part of the Soviet Union! [...] every word, every source of information available to her has been government controlled - books, magazines, television, radio, newspapers, everything. It is almost impossible to describe this; it has to be experienced - but it feels a little like being smothered in cotton wool. It is a very odd feeling and it overtakes one after only a few days in the Soviet Union. I can’t describe it, put it over emotionally… but try to imagine a situation in which every textbook, novel, magazine, you name it, is published by the Government Printing Office, every editor is a political employee - and censor. [...] But the last and most important factor is that it starts so young. [...] We were taken into a kindergarten class, perhaps thirty boys and girls five or six years old - they had not yet learned to read. They gave a little performance for us - a little girl recited a poem, a little boy delivered a memorized prose recitation, the class sang a song. The children were healthy and clean and well dressed and happy and it was all very charming indeed, much like a parallel welcome to a visitor in one of our own kindergartens.
After we were outside and temporarily out of earshot of any of the local people, Mrs. Heinlein asked me if I had understood it; I admitted that I had caught only half a dozen words - I do not speak Russian - ordering a meal or directing a taxi driver is my outside limit.
'Well,' she answered, 'the little girl was reciting the life of Lenin, the little boy gave a speech about the Seven Year Plan, and the song the class sang was about how we must all fight to preserve our revolution.'"

Some of you might scoff at Heinlein's description as hyperbolic, or a relic of the fifties. Allow me to shatter that delightful skepticism. I was one of those children, or at least a beast very much of their circus. I was in fact born into one of those old Second World regimes before emigrating to the States, and my first grade year was interrupted by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Sometime in the preceding year, my class gave exactly the sort of performance the Heinleins witnessed, and my family still ribs me about getting up there and confidently belting out a poem about the "Beloved Party" not that I remember the event aside from indeed reciting something in front of a crowd. I can only assume my teacher made me memorize it. The political content held about as much meaning for my five- or six-year-old self as would a dissertation on gynecology.

But you Love the Party, don't you?

Don't you?

DON'T YOU?!?

Even more of you might contend that the U.S.A. or other countries given over to politically correct propaganda are not policed by a Government Printing Office. True... but then The Inquisition was technically never a single institution either. Didn't matter. Go ahead and ask your neighbours if any of them are practicing Cathars.

 

As all forms of mass insanity feed on the same human weaknesses, similarities between popular movements, be they religious, racist, political or psychosocial, are by no means accidental; purging the intelligentsia is always one of their early moves. By entrenching themselves in universities' humanities or soft/social science departments and increasingly bloated administrations over the past two generations, feminists gave themselves veto power over definitions of education or a civilized upbringing. From there their precepts trickled outward into lower education, training and rehabilitation programs, and from there public and business policies. The rabid witch hunt that is the MeToo movement is merely one of the manifestations of a mass insanity half a century in the making.

And, like any effective brainwashing, it gets you young and never lets go. Slogans on posters in grade schools promoting "equality" always implying this can be achieved by more concessions and sacrifices from men; workplace harrassment policies leading to re-education facilities; campus rape counseling teaching young women that they are not responsible for their own actions, that any dissatisfaction is cause for banishing a male; but most of all, our lovely modern media. Our public figures are not hired or discovered; they are appointed by political lobbies, and the largest one retains its veto power. Their output toes the "man bad, woman good" party line, and anyone who steps over it gets slapped with a harrassment lawsuit or is simply fired under threat of fanatical backlash. You can't make a video game about fantasy dwarves fighting fantasy orcs without constantly reiterating the superiority of she-dwarves and she-orcs, because that's the only fantasy we're permitted. You cannot make a movie about soldiers choking to death in the mud at Agincourt in 1415 without tacking on a few scenes where a perfect female browbeats those inferior males.

Luckily, The King at least makes an easier job of my habitually awkward segues, because Catherine the Sanctimonious was played by Lily-Rose Depp. Yes, as in that Depp, the one everyone's talking about. Let's remember the problem with #MeToo witchcraft libel is not that individuals accuse each other. Such accusations are a perfectly reasonable facet of a fair society. The problem is that everyone is already primed, by both protective instinct and vindictive indoctrination, to believe a woman's claim against a man. This is hardly a new issue. "When did you stop beating your wife" was popularized as a stereotype of bias for a century before hashtag mobs precisely because such slander is most easily swallowed. We instinctively protect the females of our tribe. It doesn't help, however, that entire generations have now grown up imbibing nothing but media in which the woman is always right and the man is always wrong, in which male guilt is pre-judged before we even meet a plaintiff. Lily-Rose Depp poured her own drop of fuel on her father's narrowly extinguished pyre, as did everyone else involved in The King.

 

As a matter of fact, Johnny Depp himself carved his own name more deeply into the ostrakon with every scene where Jack Sparrow absorbed a slap from a woman while increasingly accepting that he deserves to be slapped by women. So I'm not particularly encouraged by his court victory if all it does is enable him in making more movies where women are always entitled over pre-emptively wrong men.

As for the rest of us, I think the segments of the populace who've gotten sick of the feminist inquisition breathing down their necks might be celebrating a bit prematurely. It would be nice to think women can no longer simply have a man fired and blacklisted (or tortured to death in prison as a rapist) by no more than pointing their fingers at him... but don't hold your breath. Remember they control the horizontal spread of information by dictating media platforms' censorship policies, and the vertical by retaining control of every single humanities and soft science department.

 

Feminists will now do what tyrants always do when faced with dissent: crack down even harder. They will simply move the goalposts, redefine the issues to retain their martyrdom and moralistic fiat, just as that professor did by redefining "patriarchy" at a moment's whim to suit herself. I honestly don't know how successful they'll be. Likely the looming economic crisis will remind many women of just how useful a self-sacrificing male provider can be, which could push their methods of control (overt vs. covert) in either direction. But remember Edward Scissorhands is still stuck in complacent suburbia. We still live in a society where any six year old already knows women are better than men, and men deserving of abuse, with the same unthinking acceptance as I knew the virtues of The Party, because hundreds of millions of youths have been raised on a feminist's definition of equality: she makes the rules and you shut up you filthy pig!

They have the media, they have the schools, they have the government and an overwhelming mass of institutionalized true believers. They appoint the bureaucrats. They write the Pravda.

You have a cartoon pirate whose great victory amounts to not getting lynched.