Tuning the Fiddle While Hollywood Burns

New evidence comes daily now that we are undergoing a paradigm shift.

Sinn Fein has taken the first round of the Irish elections.

At first glance, this looks like a movement ideologically opposite to Boris Johnson’s win in Britain, or Trump’s in the US. But in Ireland, Sinn Fein was the available vehicle to register opposition to the establishment.

And not just establishment Dublin. Sinn Fein does share with Brexit and Trump a nationalistic emphasis. The name “Sinn Fein” translates “Ourselves Alone.” It looks like a vote against Brussels too. Sinn Fein means closer ties to Northern Ireland—outside the UE.

And yet the people in social power seem oblivious, still holding their bejeweled Versailles promenades. Birds of Prey, apparently, is bombing at the box, after being almost universally praised by the critics. Cats bombed. Doolittle, another big Hollywood FX extravaganza, just bombed. Audiences are no longer impressed. They are no longer drinking the soma. Few go out to theatres any more; a fact for the moment masked by large new audiences in China. There is more cash transacted in video gaming, or internet-streamed TV series, or YouTube.

Yet, as if oblivious, the Oscars ceremony was a Jacuzzi soak in political correctness. Joaqin Phoenix used his acceptance speech to protest against the human enslavement of cows.

And nobody was watching.

Berating your audience is not likely to bring them back. Scolding them for drinking milk, or for clinging to their guns and religion, or as “racists,” or “deplorables,” or “dog-faced pony soldiers.”

Or pretending to the moral high ground over the corpse of Jeffrey Epstein.

The very tone-deafness of the crusty uppers whispers of desperation. Expecting to be obeyed, they are getting agitated at the rabble’s growing refusal to curtsey nicely, and so making more elaborate, even outrageous demands.

Forcing the issue.