Vignettes From the Cultural Revolution

Have you heard the big news? Superman is now LGBT! Or, is that LGBTQ? Or perhaps, as Justin Trudeau would say, 2SLGBTQQIA+. Whatever the case may be, he's out and he's proud. But more importantly for our purposes, he's gotten really into Greta Thunberg:

Jon Kent's Superman will fight climate change in support of #climatestrike, #fridaysforfuture, and this week's #schoolstrike4climate in an upcoming issue of his ongoing series. https://t.co/cjR8kqQ6XW pic.twitter.com/5SZ0tmDNOc

— Screen Rant (@screenrant) October 15, 2021

I love the guy holding the "There's no Planet B" sign. Didn't Superman himself flee his home planet to come to Earth, gaining super powers in the process? Seems like emigrating to Krypton B worked out pretty well for him.

From the story:

Since becoming Superman, [Clark's son] Jon Kent has battled real-life issues in the DC Universe. Thus far, he's fought wildfires caused by climate change, stopped a school shooting from happening, and has protested refugees being deported.... Jon Kent joining the fight against climate change shows that he gets what being Superman truly means: inspiring and making the world a better place in the process.

Sounds about as exciting as an afternoon watching CNN, and roughly as fanciful. This should really help 10-year-olds escape the drudgery of their mask enforced school days and the impending cancellation of Christmas due to a virus that barely effects them.

In other news, Ford Motor Company is attempting their own Green reinvention, as they launch an electric version of their F-150 pickup, the F-150 Lightning. Year in and year out, the F-150 outsells its competitors due to their superior product and name recognition. As Car and Driver mentioned in their write-up on the best selling cars of 2019, Ram, Chevrolet, and GMC have each significantly redesigned their truck offerings, but the F-150, with hardly a change, still beats them out easily.

So why go electric? Well, it's largely an attempt to chase status and good publicity, and the hope that greenbacks will follow. As Kevin Williamson explains in his write-up on the F-150 Lightning, entitled 'Here Come the Electric Rednecks,'

If you want to know who is really packing the heat on the great American scene A.D. 2021, consider that Elon Musk could, on a good day, personally buy the Ford Motor Company three times over, even though Ford sells about twelve times as many vehicles a year as Tesla, which still loses money on its automobile business — its profits in the first quarter of 2021 came from Bitcoin investments and from selling emissions credits.

That is, Ford generates real money and Tesla imaginary money. These days the latter is preferable to the former. How long that will last, however, is anyone's guess, especially as the entire automotive industry is struggling under the global chip shortage which has stalled production and shocked the market worldwide.

Meanwhile, Queen Elizabeth II has now officially joined her fellow elderly monarch and religious leader Pope Francis in naming the "environmental crisis" as our most pressing political concern. The Queen, of course, rarely speaks about contentious topics, but this time she seems to have decided that there is no harm in being publicly on the side of the great and the good. And her move in this direction seems to be responsible for at least some healing, specifically that of the troubled royal family. Environmentalism is reportedly helping bring them together, from her accused sex-trafficker son to her brainless celebrity-hound grandson.

Still, with Britain being roiled by an ongoing energy crisis which is at least partly caused by the environmentalist enthusiasms of her ruling class, one wonders whether this was a prudent course of action by Her Majesty. It might not be long before her subjects come to believe that, like her uncle Edward, she'd chosen the wrong side.

So what do all of these things have in common? They are examples of venerable institutions bending over backwards to gain the approval of the environmentalist movement, and risking the good will of those who have kept them going for so long. Moreover, they're doing so at a time when the Green movement seems to be in real danger. The global energy crisis has environmentalism struggling to keep it's own head above water, but they're acting like it is their life preserver.

At the same time, they are instances of the cultural revolution, which completed its long march through western academia decades ago, colonizing a new host, like some parasitic bacteria. The revolution, which can produce nothing of it's own, is attempting to live off of the cultural capital of its newest targets. Once it's sucked them dry, of course, it will move on, leaving an empty husk in its wake, as it has with education. Before long, kids will stop buying comic books, Americans in rural areas will stop seeing F-150s as an identity marker, Catholics will become (more) alienated from the Church, and patriotic Britons won't go out of their way to speak up for the Queen, and certainly not her heir.

My advice to whoever is making decisions about the future of these institutions: Beware.