Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

Recently watched the Amazon Prime movie “Heads of State” starring Idris Elba as Prime Minister of the UK and John Cena as President of the United States.  They join forces to defeat the bad guys who want the US out of the NATO alliance.  

One of the bad guys gives a moving speech explaining the plan and the most amusing thing happened:  I found myself cheering for the bad guys. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Pretty good movie but a massive propaganda failure. 

Joe Doakes

Every time I’m tempted to re-up Prime, I hear something like this.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Sydney Sweeney (the Good Jeans ad model) is in trouble for climbing the hillside to hang her new line of fashion bras on the Hollywood sign. She didn’t get permission from the owners. Here’s the final photo:

You’re telling me this millionaire hot chick spent hours climbing all over the sign to personally hang bras?  I wouldn’t have believed it.  I would have bet real money that her publicity company hired people to do it, that hers is merely the name on the label, that she had no idea what permits are needed.  

Here’s the video.  I would have lost that bet.  Awesome prank.  Good for her.

I certainly hope the DA doesn’t prosecute poor Sydney.  She could wind up a convicted felon and get stuck serving as President of the United States.  Wouldn’t wish that on anybody.

Joe Doakes

 

Christy was, btw, a really good movie.   

Joe Doakes, long ago of Como. Park, emails:

People keep using the phrase “go to the mattress” when talking about fighting. “Republicans must go to the mattress over this issue.”

 

No dummy, it’s “mat,” as in wrestling mat, as in “take your opponent to the mat to pin him.”  Didn’t your high school have a wrestling team?

 

 But of course some idiot didn’t understand that 20 years ago and wrote the dialogue wrong in a movie. So now the internet thinks that’s the origin of the phrase. Or possibly that it relates to 15th century Italians who hung mattresses on the walls to deflect cannon fire.  Really?  You figure people today know so much about Renaissance warfare that they use it everyday speech? Ridiculous.

 

 How does society recover a lost idiom?

 

Joe Doakes

By doing more wrestling. 

(And I think it was Clemenza, not Puzo, that got the term wrong.   Which, if true, I think is hilarious).  

Joe Doakes formerly of Como Park emails:

Hollywood keeps putting out Girl Boss movies with the lead role played by a good- looking female actress, like Angela Jolie as Lara Croft in Tomb Raider.

 

When are they going to make a Girl Boss movie with the lead role played by a transgender “female,” maybe Dylan Mulvaney of Bud Light fame?  

 

Why is Hollywood so full of haters? 

 

Joe Doakes

It only took ten years, and the advent of ubiquitous AI, but my book “Trulbert:  A Comic Novella About The End Of The World As We Know It” is finally out on audio!

Back in college, I did a little acting.  

The highlight?  I played Henry II i “The Lion in Winter”.   And I had a blast. 

One part of the role involved using makeup to turn 20 year old Mitch into 55 year old Hank Deuce.  And since this was a small college theater, at a school that didn’t even offer a drama degre,  there weren’t a whole lot of extra people playing “Makeup Girl”.  

More than that, the professor, the late Patricia Lavin, was a formidable woman – she’d been the first female theatrical producer in LA back in the fifties and sixties, and had a long list of theatrical and film credits (she had done makeup work on the original “Planet of the Apes”, for one example) – who made sure that we learned how to do the nuts and bolts of theater. 

Including makeup. 

Which meant I, the very adolescent-macho Mitch, had to learn how to do his own makeup. 

And looking at the photos of 20 year old Mitch playing 55 year old Hank II, I actually looked a fair bit like I do today (albeit with a lot more hair). 

I thought about that when I saw this “comedian” talking about the Rep. McBride crisis:

So that’s what a woman is! Someone who can do makeup!

By that definition…

…well, do I even need to finish the sentence?

HBO tells the Wokies to take a breather.

Insert the requisite epilogue: it’s not the end, it’s not even the beginning of the end, it might be the end of the beginning. Or perhaps more recently – the monster in the movie never dies the first time it’s killed.

But maybe the Disney lesson is sinking in?

The highlight of the entire internet this past week has been Justine Bateman – best known as “Mallory Keaton” from “Family Ties”, let’s just say 20 years ago.  

She’s a filmmaker today.   And she’s turning her eye to the parade of leftist rage TikToks that’ve happened since the election. 

Like this one (it’s a short thread – click to read):

The humor is dry enough to make an Englishman put down his tea and say “I say, that is dry humour indeed”. Cold and dry like a great martini when out snowmobiling.

You can see the whole series on X at “#SocialMediaVideoCritiques – but I’ll give you another right here.

I saw the Reagan biopic last week.

The movie was…good.  

Not the great movie the subject or the time of history deserves; Philip Klein points out some of the problems I couldn’t quite articulate, while Jim Geraghty echoed the reasons I left the show so excited anyway:

Reagan is ultimately deeply satisfying for those of us who have fond memories of the 40th president, and packs a lot into its two hours and 15 minutes. The movie gains some focus from its framing device — Jon Voight is a geriatric KGB spymaster, explaining to a young and ambitious Russian leader why the Soviet Union really collapsed. (I started wondering if this was meant to be a secular The Screwtape Letters. I also wondered if the film was attempting to draw a parallel between the Soviet threat of the last century and the coalition of hostile powers facing us today.) It is the best depiction of Reagan in pop culture since the video game Call of Duty.

The movie was clearly a conservative effort – I think most of the “out” Republican actors and entertainers in the business play some part or another (the fall of the Berlin Wall is framed by seminal opening guitar figure from “Sweet Child of Mine” – covered by Christian guitarist Phil Keaggy). And but for that conservative effort, the movie – or an honest movie – about the era would never get made.

As Klein points out, it’s far from perfect; the movie tries to jam a lot of story into two hours, and doesn’t always do it elegantly.  Sometimes the shortcuts are intentionally hilarious – the film jams the rapid-fire deaths of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko into sixty seconds via one of the more hilarious little segments I’ve seen since Terry Gilliam worked for Monty Python.  Sometimes – like the meet cute between Reagan and Nancy Davis, his future wife – they feel like plot devices that I hoped were homages to Reagan’s B-movie background.

So the movie was…good.   It’s clearly low-ish budget, and feels like it. 

But the story is one that direly needs telling to a whole new generation.  Probably two generations. 

Is Reagan the movie to do it?  Maybe not. 

If it prompts those of us who were there to tell the story to those benighted generations?  

Now there, we’re onto something. 

Because the story is heavily-laden with nods to our current environment.   At the beginning, Jon Voight’s KGB agent – the narrator for the movie – reminds the viewer that communism always sought to conquer both by force of arms and, more insidiously, from within. 

And Reagan saw that clearly when he was with the Screen Actors Guild, long before he even became a Republican, thirty years before he became president. 

The movie hits the high points – some of them hard (the Brandenburg Gate speech, Rejkjavik, the clarifying moment that was the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II), some much too quickly (the economic comeback from the ’82 recession and the ’84 debate with Mondale);  the story really deserves a trilogy – perhaps separate stories for his genesis as an anti-communist, the domestic story, and the part they said couldn’t be done, his leadership in pressing the fall of the USSR. 

But this’ll do for now. 

For those who remember them, seeing the renditions and backstory of the Brandenburg Gate speech was a misty bit of nostalgia that resonates all too hard as we see tyranny resurging, around the world and at home. 

But perhaps the most redolent moment was one I was too young to remember live – the Time for Choosing speech, one of the most magnificent bits of oratory in this nation’s history.

Since my old friend Michael Brodkorb chose to misappropriate it in his Strib op ed endorsing Kamala Harris, I think the real thing needs a lot of airing. 

We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.” Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” Now let’s set the record straight. There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace – and you can have it in the next second – surrender.

Admittedly, there’s a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face, that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand, the ultimatum. And what then, when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we’re retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he’s heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he’d rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us.

You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin – just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it’s a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” And this – this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said, “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits – not animals.” And he said, “There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.

 

The speech deserves better than to be hijacked in support of a couple of actual communists. This record will be set straight.

Pass it along.

When Rolling Stone occasionally bothers to write about music, it can actually be…

…readable.

For example, this article, making and supporting the case that Creedence Clearwater Revival is the biggest thing in pop music today:  

I mean, it’s not wrong:

CCR are the most awesomely bizarre case of a classic band that’s bigger than ever right now, without anyone really noticing. But their greatest-hits collection Chronicle is riding high on the Billboard 200 every week, always somewhere in the thirties or forties. It’s currently Number 39, right ahead of the new Ariana Grande album. It’s higher than anything by the Beatles or the Stones or Zeppelin or Queen. It’s crazy because there’s no star power involved, no cult of personality, no Freddie Mercury, no Stevie/Lindsey, no backstory or drama or charisma, no biopic or TV placement, and God knows no sex appeal. Just four anonymous flannel dudes and a bunch of perfect guitar songs about rivers.

Of all the “classic rockers who stay famous forever” stories, this is the one where there’s nothing but the songs. Of all the fans who bought/streamed/whatevered Chronicle this week, I doubt half could give the leader’s name, or tell you a thing about him. But only a hardcore fan could name the other three. Anyone who can tell Stu Cook from Doug Clifford probably is Stu Cook or Doug Clifford. You couldn’t pick any of these dudes out of a police lineup. There’s no hero worship, no narrative, no stars. There’s no love story, no death story. Only the songs.

For the record, I can tell the difference between Clifford and Cook.  Most of the time. 

The “why” is the interesting part:

But ironically, there’s plenty of dramatic lore in the Creedence story, if anyone knew or cared. There’s two brothers hating each other — after big brother Tom Fogerty quit the band, they never reconciled before his death. John was one of the very few rock stars to get drafted in the Vietnam era — he did his time in the Army, waiting out a year of misery, then returned to fight his way back into the Bay Area bar-band scene. None of his peers had a struggle like that to boast about, but it was a cred card he refused to play, even when he was protesting the war in “Fortunate Son.” There’s even the hilarious lawsuit after his 1985 solo hit “The Old Man Down the Road” — it sounded so much like Creedence, his ex-label took him to court, making him the only rock star ever to get sued for plagiarizing himself. He had to take the witness stand with a guitar, to show the jury why his songs sounded like John Fogerty. During cross-examination, he snapped, “What am I supposed to do, get an inoculation?”

Great stories — but only hardcore fans know them, because Fogerty had zero knack for talking about himself. Since the band broke up, he’s never stopped railing at his ex-bandmates, stewing over business injustices he never had much luck convincing anyone else to care about. His 2015 memoir is a barely-readable pity party. Even in their heyday, the group’s interviews were nothing but drab complaints about not getting taken seriously enough. As Cook groused to Rolling Stone, “People know about our music but they don’t know about our heads.”

I haven’t said “worth a read” about something in Rolling Stone in a long, long time.  And it’ll probably be a while before I do it again. 

But here you go.

Ask not “why is Hollywood endlessly rebooting old movies ideas” . That one’s obvious; Big Hollywood has almost not good new ideas, and comic books are reaching a state of diminishing returns.

The real question is, how will modern morés bastardize their victims – in this case, Fistful of Dollars?

Let’s get our predictions on the board.

The protagonist will be a woman.

Instead of a revolver, she’ll practice some anachronistic martial art. Or maybe use a longbow.

The villains – Mexicans in the original – will be white males.

The townspeople will be plucky single mothers whose white male husbands ran off with saloon floozies (but for a few Latino families and at least one anachronistic black one).

Others?

The Sundance Festival is moving from Utah to…well, somewhere.

And Minneapolis wants in:

In a provided statement, Mayor Jacob Frey says Minneapolis’ cultural scene would be a perfect fit for the festival.

“With our thriving arts and entertainment scene, diverse cultural heritage, and passionate film community, Minneapolis is the ideal backdrop for the Sundance Film Festival,” said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. “There is no city that embraces the arts quite like we do – and Minneapolis already has a long history of supporting independent filmmakers and their art of storytelling. Sundance would be a welcome addition to our theater community, and we’re excited to throw our hat in the ring to host this world-renowned festival.”

Minneapolis’ bid is being backed by CEOs from Target, Best Buy, and U.S. Bancorp along with the McKnight Foundation and Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies.

There was a time this would have been a no-brainer. From the 60s to the 2000s, Minneapolis had one of the most dynamic arts scenes in the country; the biggest regional theatre community between the coasts; art and music communities that punched waay above their weight; others, from dance to literature far out of proportion to the city’s size; even a breakout film scene in the ’90s.

Almost none of that is true anymore. Austin, Salt Lake City, Boulder, Santa Fe, Raleigh/Durham, Boise, Nashville, even Atlanta have become much more dynamic. Most of them are much less expensive (not that that’s necessarily a huge factor for the tony Sundance crowd).

Minneapolis is like the high school football star come back to the 20 year reunion, working a job he hates and paying bills from his divorce from the head cheerleader. His day has passed. He might have another day, someday, but it ain’t today.

I hope the city gets it – but I’d be amazed.

Other generations crossed oceans, built the impossible, decoded the indecipherable, flew to the moon.

But never let anyone say the frontiers have all been surmounted:

All glory to the heroes!

…and Hollywood obliges.

They’re apparently using North Korean animators.

Joe Doakes, formerlly of Como Park, emails:

Republicans need better advertising to win this Fall.  They need a cartoonist. 

Panel one:  Biden saying “We must make gas more expensive so people use less, to save the planet for our children.” 

Panel two: farmer telling trucker: “The price of fuel went up.  I can’t afford to eat the cost, I’m passing it along to you.”

Panel three: trucker telling grocer: “His cost went up and so did mine.  I can’t afford to eat the costs, I’m passing them along to you.”

Panel four: grocer telling Black woman carrying baby: “Their costs went up.  I can’t afford to eat the costs, I’m passing them along to you.”

Panel five: Black woman holding baby, both looking out of the panel at reader: “We can’t afford to eat.”

Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park

Conservative cartoonists have a half-life of about one year.

But hope springs eternal.

Remember this episode – one of the events boosters of Downtown Minneapolis have hung their hat on as a symbol of their commitment and capability?

It’s the 1999 move of the historic Schubert Theater [1] – a $14 million move that was part of a $42 million (in 1999 dollars – call it about $73 million today – as part of one of the various downtown revitalization efforts that happened before downtown got devitalized. The Cowles family pumped a pile of money into turning it into a community art space – home to a dance theater and other arts companies.

Well, Downtown Minneapolis is gonna downtownminneapolis:

The Cowles Center for Dance and Performing Arts announced Wednesday that it would end its dance programming at the Goodale Theater as of March 31. The downtown Minneapolis center’s educational and community programs will, however, continue through the end of the 2023-24 school year in May.

“It became clear, probably several months ago, that Artspace, our largest donor and administrative partner, was having their own financial troubles, which wouldn’t allow them to sustain their level of giving to the Cowles,” said Joseph Bingham, co-director of the Cowles Center. “We’ve been working in the background to kind of figure out what that meant financially and figure out either a Plan B or whether that meant potential fundraising or another partner in the picture.”

According to Bingham, two weeks ago, Cowles staff found that Artspace’s financial picture couldn’t sustain the performing arts center.

It’s unlikely that financial disarray in an arts organization is directly connected to the crime and economic malaise that’s been Downtown’s dominant feature this past four years.

But for at least some people – in this case, Libertarian Burnsville City Councilwoman Cara Schulz – one other social and literal contagion had something to do with it:

I wrote Cara to clarify. There was literally an email saying “good riddance and a pox on your house, as it were”, or words to that effect.

But yet another unused building certainly isn’t going to help things.

So – here’s the current plan:

• Some major network picks up my show. Maybe weekday afternoons.
• I turn the building into a broadcast studio (a la Keillor at the Fitzgerald) and conservative event center.

[1] Ho Lee Crap. 25 years?

“Art” as humanity used to know it is pretty much dead, at least in any community of people who call themselves “artists” anymore.

This was from a, for lack of a better term, “art event” in Powderhorn Park over the weekend:

Ignore the stupid sled.

Look, rather, at the audience. What do you see?

Inevitably, they are smug, corn-fed, entitled, white progressive members of the laptop class and the non-profit/industrial complex – no doubt from “Urban Life” theme parks like Marcy Holmes or Merriam Park, larping it up as “art fans” in Powderhorn, the part of Minneapolis that smug progressives go to when they want to be “down with the neighborhood” (before they scamper back home to where all the barristas and short order brunch technicians have to commute to from Fridley and Brooklyn Center).

The MPD has condemned the display – which, I’m sure, is causing all sorts of nasal snorking over lattes this morning.

And why not? It’s not their stores being cleaned out (none of them as any concept of the free market more involved than a coffee shop), not their cars being jacked (does anyone actually steal electric cars?), not them waking up to bullet holes in their siding.

Here’s hoping every last one of these cretins needs a cop sometime soon.

Who knows? Sometimes even Progressives can learn something.

My college theatre professor, Pat Lavin, used to talk about one of her jobs when she was an LA theatrical producer and director – which was going in to have a series of rehearsals with long-running shows to “take out the ‘improvements'” that’d crept into the show over months or years of live performances.

Sounds like writers need to come back from the grave and do the same thing.

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

The Guthrie Theatre keeps sending me begging letters.  Please, please come see a show to support us.   We need the money.

Well, okay, what are you showing?  “Dial M for Murder,” hey, I know that one, it’s a classic.  Wait, what’s this in the description?

“While in London promoting her new murder mystery, Maxine drops in on her former lover Margot who shares some distressing news: She’s being blackmailed for a love letter from Maxine that went missing after their affair ended . . . This clever, fast-paced adaptation adds extra layers to the iconic tale, making the “Will he get away with it?” question even more thrilling.”

I remember “Dial M for Murder.”  There were no lesbians.  I can’t see that this “clever, fast-paced adaption” adds anything worthwhile to the story.  It looks to me like base pandering.  That’s why the Guthrie needs money, because they’re so busy signaling their virtue that nobody wants to see their shows.  They can’t just tell a good story, they must “improve” it by making it a morality tale, by beating their audience over the head with how hip and woke and sensitive they are.  They must bastardize every classic into boring message fiction, even though “boring message fiction is the leading cause of puppy-related sadness” and people really shouldn’t make puppies sad.

Nope, not going.  Which saves me a c-note or more, with dinner and parking, so silver lining.

Joe Doakes, staying home but not in Como Park

I’m all for updated retellings of classics. For example, “Richard III” set in the 1930s was brilliant, because it showed the eternal truths of the original play in a setting – interwar Europe – where those truth were acting in real time within living memory. (Perhaps a version set in the 2020 election would be in order).

So – how is Dial M improved with an extraneous lesbian sub-plot?

I’m open to suggestions.

I saw Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life” two years ago.

“Whaaaaat? You never saw…”

That’s what I freaking said. I somehow managed not to see the movie until Christmas-time, 2021.

I probably watched it 4-5 times that season, and a couple more last year and this.

But I wasn’t aware that there was another ending…:

Speaking of movies – it’s become clear in recent years that the only thing needed to call a film a “Chrismas Movie” is any intersection with Christmas of any kind, no matter how tangential.

So with that in mind, here is the list of the top 12 “Chrfistmas Movies”:

1. Die Hard
2. Alexander Nevsky
3. Lethal Weapon 1
4. Patton
5. Goodfellas
6. Full Metal Jacket
7. Carrie
8. Better Off Dead
9. Stalag 17
10. Rocky IV
11. The Rev
12. Trading Places.

But whatever you think is really a Christmas movie, I wish you and yours a happy one.

…that the best movie of all time (for my money) debuted:

Casablanca ends begins year 82.

I can’t post the whole movie – stupid copyrights – but I’ll throw this out there in the unlikely event some of you haven’t seen it.

Me? By my rough count, I’ve seen it something like 86 times in the past forty years.

Appetizer? One of the most gloriously emotionally manipulative scenes in the history of movies:

I’m also reminded that the first time I saw the movie is now closer to the debut than the present day. I don’t want to talk about it.

I’m informed that the National Museum of Women in the Arts has re-opened after $70,000,000 in renovations.

I think I missed the NMOWITA in my various sprints through the DC museum scene, but by all accounts it’s dedicated to art either created by, or created by intersectional classes favored by, entitled upper middle class white academic progressives…

…who are nevertheless “victims”:

“While the discourse has progressed since the museum was founded, gender and intersectional racial inequality remain pervasive in the art world,” the museum’s director, Susan Fisher Sterling, said during the preview Tuesday. According to a 2022 report, female-identifying artists made up only 11 percent of acquisitions at US museums between 2008 and 2020 (with Black female artists representing just .5 percent).

I’d like to ask Ms. Fisher Sterling to show her work – a walk through the Art Crawl and the Fringe Festival might make you think a supermajority of “artists” are women in some currenty-fashionable sense of the term.

And if the National Endowmen of the Arts is spending $70,000,000 to remodel a museum based on your “art”, you’re not oppressed.

Although…

…perhaps the critics could “oppress” you with an honest review.

It seems appropriate.

Government subsidy is the death of art.

Our intellectual future is in the best of hands.

Book cover for Erich Maria Remarque’s classic western suspense novel:

And let’s not ignore this classic, complete with forward by Senator Blutarski:

Pinky swear, I found the first one on Amazon once upon a time.

The second one needs no pinky swear.

Overdoses.

Public solicitation and delivery of prostitution.

Open drug dealing.

Gang activity. Robberies. Muggings. Assaults

No, I’m not talking about the House DFL Caucus offices. I’m talking about the big Metro Transit stations in Minneapolis.

And what’s the remedy?

According to Metro Transit and its big government stakeholders: murals.

Metro Transit is turning to murals in an effort to make its bus and light-rail stations more welcoming.

The latest installation is at the I-35W and Lake Street Transit Station in south Minneapolis, a busy hub that’s been plagued by graffiti and where two people were wounded in a shooting this spring. Police data also show there have been two robberies near the station this year.

Local artist Kada Goalen spent six weeks and 90 gallons of paint transforming gray and beige concrete walls and pillars into a vibrant spectacle featuring giant songbirds against a backdrop of color.

Let’s cut to the chase: what this is is not a serious attempt to make Transit less onerous at best, dangerous at worst.

It’s yet another transfer of money from taxpayers to the favored clients of the political class.

Transgender woman deadlifter breaks Canadian women’s record.

By over 200 pounds

You can tell it’s a woman. It’s the pink socks.

Also true for movies, literature, art, theater, even standup comedy:

I’m not inclined to care much about whether someone who produces something I want, need or enjoy “hates” me – least of all with anything remotely artistic. Especially with music – consuming which gives the artist almost no money unless you buy merchandise or go to a concert.

You produce some piece of music I love, but you hate me? Laugh’s on you.

But the cartoon is correct in that the left has grown as entitled about art as they have about, say, minority, female and gay voters.