The Wingnut Obsession With Patrick Swayze

Behold the glory that is Jonah Goldberg on Red Dawn.

My old friend Dave Plotz's piece on Red Dawn (Kathryn linked below) is close to a parody of the sort of liberal moral equivalence that made so many liberals useless in the late stages of the Cold War. He writes:

But what's most unsettling about Red Dawn today is not its infatuation with the warrior death cult. It's that the movie's historical parallels have been turned upside down. In 1984, the Soviets of Red Dawn represented, well, the Soviets, and the Wolverines represented both the Americans and also the plucky Afghan mujahideen then defeating the Red Army in a guerilla war. But on re-viewing, Red Dawn isn't a stark reminder of Cold War fears. Rather, it's a pretty good movie about Iraq, with the United States in the role of the Soviets and the insurgents in the role of the Wolverines.

I'm not going to go point by point through the whole thing. But what's striking about David's analysis isn't merely the out-of-date moral equivalence better suited for The Nation circa 1983, but it's even more recent dated moral equivalence argument as well. Plotz's thesis would have made some cultural or political sense — no matter how much I disagreed with it — if he wrote it in 2005 before the surge. Now even as retro-rethink journalism it seems like it's missed its moment.

Regardless, the comparison of Iraq to America only works if the pre-invasion Iraq was the peace-loving idyll of Michael Moore's imagination. It wasn't. The analogy also needs America's invasion of Iraq to be motivated by base imperialistic designs. It wasn't.

I will let you judge it on its own merits.

WOLVEREEEEEEEENS!