What happened to the old Hollywood?

Hollywood Effluvium, Statist Bilge

By G.M. Corrigan

 If, inexplicably, one might want to vicariously experience what it’s like to be simultaneously sodomized and vomited on in, say, the shallower reaches of a Timbuktu sewage ditch—while sampling some of that torrid “taproom’s” suspect slurry—go see the movie “Get Him to the Greek,” or even “MacGruber,” for that matter.

But I sugarcoat the subject.

Degrading, scatological and nihilistic, these young adult sexploitation “comedies”—whose Trojan horse “plots” don’t deserve the dignity of a summary—are really nothing short of an existential assault on everything that is good, decent and uplifting about life and traditional American values.

As such, both movies, whose artistically-challenged purveyors (Universal and Rogue Pictures were the distributors, respectively) undoubtedly see their work as brilliantly “edgy” and “irreverent,” are metaphors for what art, morals, “humor,” and civics have become in late-great America.

And, like current statist thinking in the area of “reproductive rights,” state-assisted suicide, human sexuality and “transforming America,” that unfolding is a debased, self-absorbed and illiberal zeitgeist that’s ultimately ruinous to civil society and to the very artistic freedom that these film producers so wantonly abuse. Pity the nation.

But I hold back.

These films—and others of their ilk, like “Hot Tub Time Machine,” which, unfathomably, lured A-lister John Cusack to its cast—showcase the kind of culture-subverting fare that Weimar Germany’s The Frankfurt School—a pedagogical omission, no doubt, in today’s feel-good high school curricula—deemed necessary for the triumph of the socialist American utopia.

Apparently it’s an utopia in which fellatio, masturbation, vulgarity, drug abuse, narcissism, sexual predation, denigration of women, senseless violence, mutilation, anal sex, alcoholic stupors, and widespread moral dereliction figure prominently—packaged, of course, as hip and socially redeeming public policy.

But I stifle myself.

Canary-in-the-coal mine “entertainments,” these so-called spoofs—both rated “R”—offer the kind of  palsied, comedic appeal that some might find in, say, watching institutionalized coprophiliacs smear themselves with excrement on a sultry summer day.

They’re salacious, self-destructive, pit-of-hell fare—and underage youngsters, who are in no wise stopped by the MPAA rating system, flock to them in droves, absorbing their dark and destructive impressions about life and society, and likely concluding that only some kind of state intervention is anodyne. Hey, man, we’re all socialists now, as Newsweek last year decreed.

Right on, Frankfurt School and today’s lemming-ranks of groin-driven, group-thinking pseudo-liberals.

Poison the minds and wills of a society’s replacement generation with a witch’s brew of sexual titillation, campy nihilism, and intoxicating, vicarious violence—destroying in the process self-government’s fragile flowers of self-reliance, decency and inspiration above the crotch-level—and turn this “last, best hope of mankind” into just another sclerotic and fear-ridden, Kafkaesque nightmare state.

But it’s all done in good—if not clean—fun, and in the name of public-spirited parody in service of the secular Beulah Land. Right?

Wrong. More likely these films are accurate reflections of the depraved mind-sets, agendas and moral compasses of the writers and directors—Jason Segel/Nicholas Stoller and Will Forte/Jorma Taccone, respectively—behind their putrescent production. If not, their work would have been more satirically accomplished.

Oh, and did I mention, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman makes a cameo—and largely feckless—appearance in “Get Him to the Greek.” I guess there’s just something too kinky and orgiastic about hanging with the smut merchants for left-leaning dismals scientists to resist.

Maybe, then, there was something more than the merely macroeconomic to Krugman entitling his 2003 collection of columns the “The Great Unraveling.”

But I may be overly tactful.

Corrosive of true civic-mindedness, which marks not only human nature’s raunchier tendencies but also its loftier aspirations, these films’ sick obsession with the gross, the mean and the addictively carnal foists delusion, despair and a dangerous self-absorption on its followers—ideal conditions for creeping statism and the belief that the world can only be governmentally, as opposed to individually or communally, ennobled.

It’s a condition reflected today in the administration’s facile, fabulist and unfailingly federal-centric policy decisions—and generally in President Obama’s vaunted hope to “transform” the country through coercive, federal action.

Poised, polished and pedantic, President Obama is typical of a privileged, post-war generation that was raised on pie-in-the-sky iconoclasm and radical rhetoric and ignorant of the true genius of the American constitutional system—a realistic, anti-utopian system that’s actually powered by citizens’ “untransformed” self-interests in service of the aggregate, common good.

It’s the statist perversion of this inspired system—through Frankfurt School critical theory activism, rampant immorality, utopianism, intellectual arrogance, politics-as-the-new religion, Gen-X shallowness and, yes, rapacious capitalism as well—that needs to be transformed, not the system itself.

Only this can save us from the disgusting and dystopic vision depicted in today’s smutty “spoofs” so popular with tomorrow’s American leaders.

And I don’t think the situation’s seriousness can be overstated.

Corrigan, who is writing a “late-great American” novel, entitled Chasing Chickens: A Love Story, is a Maryland-based free-lance writer