The Critical Drinker is Trying to Save Western Folk Religion from THE MESSAGE

He is the Diogenes of the Trailer Park

Last week I opened up a new vein of exploration on another YouTuber: @TheCriticalDri2 . Today I released the second video in that series on his angry profanity laced tirade about what he sees as the corruption of Hollywood story telling...

I haven't seen a video of mine do what the first of this series did since I started commenting on the @jordanbpeterson Biblical series.

I'm better prepared now though. I've already got an Estuary to welcome them.

The @TheCriticalDri2 is both popular and easy to dismiss for the same reasons. 1. He's hitting on current popular culture war tropes, the sort of dynamic that will boost your YT analytics, the sort of dynamics addressed in this video

2. He sticks mostly to major Blockbuster movies, an area of film criticism that more serious critics sometimes turn away from because they are the joy of the rabble...

3. There's no doubt in my mind that many who follow him are indulging in the common guilty pleasure of nursing a favorite tribal grudge fueled at least in part by a mixture of nostalgia and resentment.

The @TheCriticalDri2 however really doesn't play this straight, like many other channels I could point to. He adopts a persona of a trope that many opponents of this mob would love to paint them with. There is more going on here.

The man behind the character is himself a successful writer so if you can get past the fast cut populism the videos are thick with (I recommend listening rather than watching) he is addressing something serious and real, the state of the religious story in the West.

If @PageauJonathan and @jordanbpeterson are playing it straight to a middlebrow and sometimes highbrow audience, @TheCriticalDri2 is in DEEP cover. There's ZERO association here with overt "religion". The cussing alone should keep the pastor out of the bar...

This level of Hollywood has LONG been the heart of folk religion in the West. Archetypes that used to be communicated by superstition, fairy tales, mythology and folklore now live in popcorn movies and their future is in peril.

Movie theaters were temples but now THE MESSAGE has moved into the religious altars of the god SET and pocket bibles replaced by smart phones.

(HT @GrimGriz )

.@TheCriticalDri2 's angry drunken mission is to preserve the craft of storytelling and rescue it from THE MESSAGE that seeks to destroy Western religion for the masses from the inside the way it has happened in the church.

For this reason @TheCriticalDri2 is in many ways parallel to @jordanbpeterson and @PageauJonathan not simply because they are appealing to a similar audience but because for TCD satisfying storytelling is a gyroscope which can fallibly guide secularists to the transcendentals.

He's doing so, however, from a far deeper cover. He will revel in his deplorable status. I think of him as the Diogenes of This Little Corner so prepare to be offended...