Are creative people necessarily liberal?
Posted February 8, 2009, 09:02 ET
Is a queston posed by Roger Simon, who answers yes. Creative people are natural risk-takers, and conservative aren’t risk-takers. Q.E.D. I enjoyed his book, but on this one he’s wrong on so many levels:
1. So risk-taking entrepreneurs are liberals?
2. So the most innovative writers and poets of the last 100 years were liberals? Think Eliot, Faulkner, Pound, Yeats for starters. And while we’re at it, what about John Ford, Robert Bresson and Eric Rohmer?
3. Simon is thinking about Hollywood. But who thinks Hollywood is very creative (apart from the people who deal in pixels)?
4. One must distinguish between the political views filmakers tend to express and the movies they make. The successful ones, in any event. In a successful film, people live in a cross-hall house built around 1925, with great curb appeal. They are happily married, or if not married the film ends in a wedding. Nobody has a divorce and nobody has an abortion. In fact, the best evidence of Hollywood’s liberalism is its willingness to make politically charged films that bomb in the box office. Of course, if they stop making them the audiences will have won…
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