The great divide (continued) BY DAVID BRUDNOY

THE CULTURAL DIVIDE is the most significant indicator of the media's leftward lean, and it's widely acknowledged by ordinary Americans if not by ivory-tower keepers of the journalistic flame. Simplified, here’s the conservative mindset: conservatives respect revealed religion, mainly Christianity; support traditional values and practices; oppose gay marriage and at best tolerate but rarely admire homosexual behavior; disfavor quotas and that dream palace inhabited by people who believe the central concern of all humanity ought to be race; oppose reparations, quotas, and group-identity fixations; disfavor sex outside of marriage; oppose the legalization of any currently illegal drugs; oppose the dissemination of pornography; strongly support business and the military; favor capital punishment; oppose abortion; and — may we have a moment of mirth? — these days loathe the French.

Some of these views are held by a majority of Americans, others by a significant minority, but the point is that the above description generally characterizes contemporary liberalism's cultural opposite. Granted, a subset of conservatism, libertarianism, challenges some of the more rigid elements in this confluence of views. Some of these folks hope the Republican Party will eventually transcend its reflexive discomfort with anything related to gay people. But liberals tend to regard groups like the Log Cabin Republicans, composed of homosexual Republicans, as absurd. Conservatives tend to agree, and so the right doesn't see much movement on these social issues. Indeed, most conservatives consider libertarianism deviant.

Liberals stand on the flip side of standard conservative attitudes and beliefs. Liberals dominate Hollywood — even Alterman doesn’t contest that — and push their views in their movies, TV shows, and musical performances. Their political affiliations appear in their contributions, in the awards they bestow, and in the personages for whom they whoop and holler, as well as in those against whom they whoop and holler. Hollywood’s Oscar award to Michael Moore’s appalling bit of dissimulation and mendacity, Bowling for Columbine, spoke volumes. So did the frosty reaction, two years ago at the Oscar-fest, when the name Charlton Heston was uttered from the podium; Heston is now loathed by the Hollywood smart set — whose acting community he once represented as president of the Screen Actors Guild — owing to his presidency of the National Rifle Association and his categorical disagreement with the liberal orthodoxy. Recent pilgrimages by Hollywood A-listers to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Fidel Castro’s Cuba, with subsequent encomia especially following the glitterati’s visits to Cuba, and the ongoing litany of left-wing pronunciamentos and such are noted by all and cannot be forgotten when the topic of the media’s port-side lean comes up.

The West Wing offers a transparent window into the liberal mindset. Some say it’s a fantasy of Clinton’s White House without Clinton; everybody grants that it’s The Left Wing in all but name. Whether or not Mister Sterling, starring Barbra Streisand’s stepson Josh Brolin, returns in the fall, its brief run was a further instance of the West Wing syndrome. In this snazzy little TV show, which aired in prime time for a couple autumn-winter months, a young do-gooder (he teaches and mentors in prison), a former governor’s son, is appointed to the suddenly vacant junior Senate seat from California. He arrives in DC, promptly fires his predecessor’s chief of staff (a white man), and instantly, with no knowledge of the capabilities of anyone on his inherited staff, appoints to that post his predecessor’s press secretary (a black woman). He turns out to be not a Democrat — the horror! the horror! — but an independent. Maneuvering for committee assignments, he quickly caucuses with the Democrats — are you surprised? — and soon marches (literally) with striking Mexican-American farm workers, rushing in to champion anybody who may be depicted as The Downtrodden. Although Senator Sterling disdains the term "liberal" (he deviates by favoring capital punishment), he routinely adheres to liberal ideology and big-spending programs. TV gives us no admirable politician who is conservative or Republican. Only liberals need apply.

Business is routinely demonized on TV and in the movies. Employers are bad (unless they are black), employees are worthy, and the Establishment is untrustworthy. This, from writers, actors, and production geniuses who are some of America’s best-paid employees of huge corporations. As with politics, so with the office dynamic: the good guys are liberals, the occasional jerk is right-of-center, if politics comes up at all. Name, if you can, one prime-time good-guy office-worker star who manifests conservative cultural values and, say, avowedly criticizes gay folks.

The homosexual matter is a clear indicator of the culture divide. The movies and TV present no important gay villains; they are at best the delightful Jack and Will in Will and Grace or the wink-wink gay-seeming though unknowing Frasier and Niles in Frasier or, at worst, just there, wallpaper. The successful, likable film My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) is archetypal, with the real star played by Rupert Everett as Julia Roberts’s best bud: gay, suave, adoringly loyal, sophisticated. American movies and TV love gays. Conservatives generally do not. But, save for right-wing talk radio and small papers in the Bible Belt, the media are gung-ho for gays

Working women are not only the majority of women in America, a reality occasioned more by high tax rates than by anything else; middle-class households pay over 40 percent of their income in federal, state, Social Security, and local taxes, and two incomes are in most cases required to swing this. Working women are also the liberals’ ideal. A stay-at-home mom is retrograde. June Cleaver and Harriet Nelson live in reruns, but their type has vanished from the contemporary major cinema and television, save for Raymond’s wife and his mother on Everybody Loves Raymond and Marge on The Simpsons. The working woman works not only because in most cases she must, but because, as liberals devoutly believe, that’s her destiny. Most significant TV and movie women work outside the home. Conservative women work too, but the conservatives’ belief is that the ideal mom stays home raising the kids, while dad brings home the bacon. This is sneered at by liberals. Even "President" Bartlet’s wife works, as a doctor. In the real world, presidents’ wives don’t have careers. Whether they should or not is irrelevant to the fact that they don’t. Liberals have made The West Wing their template for the way things ought to be. Had Mrs. Bartlet remained home while youngest daughter Zoe went to college, and baked cookies and stood by her man — recall Hillary Clinton’s famous slip, when she sneered at such an idea — she would have been anathema to the liberal ideological insistence that women must have careers. Unmarried women, meanwhile, are depicted as either routinely babbling about how much sex they have or bemoaning how little sex they’re getting. Few espouse the conservative ideal of abstinence before marriage.

Liberalism’s central cultural obsession, of course, is race, and in Hollywood this results in the bizarre portrayal of a world in which a preposterously large number of judges, FBI directors, chiefs of police, CIA chiefs, college presidents, and such are black. God is black in Bruce Almighty, part of the phenomenon critics refer to as the "Magic Negro" syndrome. We’ve got the all-knowing magical caddie played by Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance, the magically gifted black giant in The Green Mile, the always-sane blind guy in Becker, and on and on: blacks are portrayed as wiser than others, as paradigms of goodness and wisdom. Blacks watch somewhat more television than whites, and certainly "diversity" in the media is occasioned by economic reality as well as by ideology (money talks to liberals and conservatives alike). But the way blacks are portrayed transcends economic common sense and realistic inclusion. On Malcolm in the Middle, Malcolm’s best friend, in a school otherwise seemingly devoid of color, is black; the future Superman (Smallville) goes to another almost all-white school, and his best pal, the only non-parent who knows his secret, is black; even Dawson’s Creek tried to entwine in its overwhelmingly white school a black principal. Examples are legion. Media liberals want Americans to think that blacks are far more in charge than they are in reality, and in constructing their delightfully fallacious utopia, they hope to convince people that this is the way things are in the real world. Liberal fixation on race wildly distorts reality throughout the cinema and TV. Predictably, most new shows on TV or new movies aimed at mass audiences will place a black character in a dominant position, even if the star is white. Fox’s new Keen Eddie, for instance, transports a bumbling, white New York detective to London, where his boss at Scotland Yard is — black. It never ends. An illusory, rosy-tinged world of racial harmony, with blacks triumphant, is Hollywood’s Holy Grail, as any TV or movie fan cannot fail to see.

The most recent and blatant example of movieland’s insistence that blacks be everywhere and always awesomely significant is The Matrix Reloaded. The John the Baptist figure, Morpheus, is black; the Oracle is a light-skinned black woman; the noble fighters who rally to Morpheus’s side are black; the rave scene is overwhelmingly populated by black and other non-white characters. This is in Zion (whose denizens should be called Zionists but, sadly, aren’t). Granted, Neo, the One, is white, as are all the Agent Smiths. All the villains are white and most of the heroes are black in this all-sizzle, no-steak snore-fest that is the film sensation of 2003.

THE WEST WING’S White House is a synecdoche for the entertainment media’s sense of themselves and of what America ought to be. Imagine, if you can stretch your imagination that far, a prime-time network program (The Right Wing?) written brilliantly and performed by top-shelf actors (A-list counterparts to Hollywood lefties extraordinaire such as Martin Sheen and Susan Sarandon, if someone could unearth performers who would dare to avow conservative views on culture and politics) in which the epitome of virtue is a handsome, kindly, devout, fundamentalist, morally unimpeachable Christian president who believes in creationism, refuses to let his daughter share a bedroom with her visiting boyfriend, prefers that gays return to the closet, has a wife who stays home and raises the children, attends church every week, prays nightly and tithes, works for massive tax cuts and deregulation of whatever his adorably lovable, true-believing conservative staffers can get their mitts on, self-assuredly derides Democratic liberals, will not watch Leno or Letterman or Kimmel or Conan or any late-night show because they demean his values, will not permit his 13-year-old son to buy rap albums or tack up Eminem posters on his wall, and ... one needn’t go on. Possibly such a show would be a hit, given that a huge cohort of Americans regards such a paradigm of conservative behavior and attitudes as admirable. But the makers of our TV shows and movies abhor these views and will not create such characters. The last charming, attractive, conservative lead character who comes to mind is Alex Keaton (Michael J. Fox), of Family Ties, in the long-ago ’80s. Most often, the non-liberal lead character is Archie Bunker or someone of that stripe.

Our dominant pop culture is the lovingly assembled handiwork of people who, by any reasonable measure, skew left; their media creations encapsulate and promulgate a left-of-center Weltanschauung. To deny this is either woefully to miss the obvious or determinedly to expect Americans to disbelieve what is manifestly so.