Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

The political grandstanding started way back in 1973 when the irascible Marlon Brando stayed home from the Academy Awards but sent an Apache princess, one Sacheen Littlefeather, to the podium to decline his award (Best Actor for The Godfather) on account of the 71-day standoff at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota between federal agents and Oglala Lakota activists who had seized the little town of Wounded Knee.

After that, political “statements” at awards ceremonies of all kinds became modish, then obligatory, and now in the age of Lefty-left Woke Jacobin activism, all you get is one denunciation after another of the monster who lives in their heads: ChrumpChrumpChrump. Cue the audience of fellow “stars” for the also obligatory standing-O, which is really a test to see if any among them dare not join in the hosannahs — so they can be anathemized.

You are seeing sheer ritual performance by performers, the highest perq of stardom being the approbation of their peers, fellow performers — nevermind the lowly gorks out in Flyover Land who “consume” the products of pop culture. This is cliché narcissism-on-parade, of course, and is now so completely institutionalized in the pop culture industries that seemingly all actors, musicians, dancers, mimes, comics, and literary figures must act-out an activist fantasy or face the pretty extreme punishment of being run out of their business.

It’s all fake and pathetic, and the more they do it, the more their various culture industries suffer — to the point now that feature production in Hollywood was down over 16-percent in 2025. It’s dying in a self-reinforcing doom-loop. The reason is no secret, but it is dangerous to speak of it: the management of our “sense-making” institutions — movies being an important one — has been taken over by women (and womanish men) acting out Cluster-B psychodrama fantasies obsessively attacking “the patriarchy” — by which they mean (but cannot say) civilization itself, the thing sedulously built by men.

The latest wrinkle in this tragic saga is the psychodrama over ICE, the men tasked with finding and deporting people who came into the country illegally. The Cluster-B women mis-direct their nurturing instincts to rescue this politically-designated “oppressed minority,” overlooking the fact that not a few of these illegal aliens turn out to be murderous psychopaths. Conveniently, too, the illegal aliens also happen to be a very useful device for the Democratic Party to pad the census and provide illicit votes, all to keep the party in power and sustain its rackets.

President Trump completes the doom-loop circle because he is the mythic figure who prompts all the anxiety behind the “mass formation” phenomenon we are witnessing. Mr. Trump is patriarchy-in-action, so he must be destroyed by the goddess-heroines of show business. The goddess-heroines seem to believe they are ushering-in a Utopia of Nurture in which no oppressed minority will be left behind. That fantasy happens to intersect with the leveling fantasies of Karl Marx and his apostles, the mentors of the obscenely-rich denizens of Hollywood so eager to abolish obscene riches. So, you see how either stupid, or mentally-ill, or both, the people in show business can be.

Last night’s awards extravaganza was the Grammys, for music.

The anti-ICE ritual flared in full effulgence with Song of the Year winner Billie Eilish - costumed not to look as a woman but rather like a piece of luggage - bathed in applause for heroically muttering, “Fuck ICE,” after picking up her little golden gramophone statuette. Perfect.

Few musicians can make a dime anymore, and a very few of those few make billions while the rest starve. The record album was the supreme art-form of my generation, and it is long gone. Record labels don’t continue to exist when there are no records. Musical acts don’t get contracts and don’t get paid. Nobody listens to FM radio anymore and so nobody is introduced to new musical talent. Live music on the small club scale is dying because the drinks cost too much. Does anyone still have a quaint old home stereo, a gigantic wall-of-sound, with four-foot-high speakers? All I’ve got is a seven-inch Bluetooth speaker.

The lively arts are dying and the remaining lively artists are assisting with the suicide.

Not far in the future, the motion picture might be a dead letter. Technology marches on.

Immersion in human experience depicted on a silver screen, using the techniques of dramaturgy, will be supplanted, we’re told, by video games that put you immersively into “a world” where a story is spinning that you can now act-out a role in.

You might see how that would entice an awful lot of people to check-out of reality altogether — and if that happens, you might well ask: who is left to run civilization?

The answer you get will be: artificial intelligence, AI. Oh, great.

But then, is it running civilization for all those pathetic people losing themselves in immersive video games? Or just for AI itself? And where does that take the human race?

Personally, I don’t expect it to work out that way. If I were disposed to investing money in the entertainment business, I’d build a theater for puppet shows.

That’s the level our civilization-destroying antics are taking us to, with the Democratic Party leading the way.