A reader on my blog says I ought to be more frightened by what I write about than I seem to be. I’m rarely accused of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses; but maybe she has a point.

The issue is “toxic entertainment” and who is responsible for it, the producers or the consumers. It’s an important issue because we consume incalculable amounts of “entertainment”—movies, TV, books, video games, etc. As we consume it, we are passively self-educating ourselves. “It’s only a movie,” we reassure ourselves. So we let down our guard.

The reader says the garbage flowing out of Hollywood is what the public wants, and that producing better “entertainment” will have no effect on a culture that’s already rife with decay and hungry for more. It’s not an unreasonable argument to make, but I can’t quite bring myself to agree with it. Maybe I don’t want to. After all, there are several factors at work.

Hollywood is full of (ahem!) important, powerful people who have given themselves to the dark side and will produce toxic crapola even if nobody wants to buy it, because that’s their mission in life. Why they do this would take too much time to explain. Suffice it to say they are, for practical purposes, Satanists.

Then there are those who believe that unless the movies, TV shows, or comic books they produce are dirty and lurid, no one will take them seriously: never rule out sophomoric immaturity as a force in the culture. If it’s ugly, wrong, diseased, warped, or filthy—why, then it’s “realistic”! And we are all “adults” for producing it! Or watching it.

How many people go to a movie because they’ve heard it’s really dirty and they want their friends to think they’re sophisticated for seeing it? I do know persons who went to “Brokeback Mountain” not because they had a strong desire to watch cowboys doing sodomy, but because they wished to impress themselves or others. Why that should impress anyone is a mystery to me.

Idle curiosity gets a vote, too. How many people go to a movie because of all the buzz about it? Hey, it got an Oscar nomination, man! So they’ve just got to see it.

Nor may we discount laziness, force of habit, or inertia. These all keep people parked in front of their TV sets. There’s so much junk on, it hardly pays to change the channel. So they sit there mesmerized.

Maybe they just don’t want to be the only one in the office, next day, who didn’t catch the latest episode of “Degenerate Sluts and Zombies.” It’s a holdover from their school days. Thanks to the lesson learned in public schooling, most of us have a deep-seated fear of not fitting in. You don’t want to sit there like a dork while all the other kids are rhapsodizing about “Bride of Chuckie.” Public education is nothing if not evangelization for conformity; and it teaches that lesson only too well.

It can’t be seriously disputed that rotten “entertainment” plays a part in rotting out the culture from within—along with “education” itself, and “higher education” even more so, and the jabbering nincompoops who pass for “wise” these days… and of course the Democrat Party pushing and promoting culture rot as if their very lives depended on it.

The trash might not seem to have the power to subvert a Bible-literate, well-informed, praying Christian; but no one should feel himself totally secure. Any one of us can meet his Waterloo at any time. That’s why we need a Savior, and that’s why we have one. Only one man ever suffered all the temptations that this life has to offer, without giving in to any of them; and none of us is Him.

Our Lord Jesus Christ commanded, “Occupy until I come.” That’s what we should be doing. We will not be judged for failing to win the culture war; but we will be judged if we don’t fight it.

I have discussed these and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/ . Stop in for a visit. A single click will take you there.

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E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net