There's been much gnashing of teeth by the liberal cognoscenti of late, especially after the election. Jane Smiley's essay in Slate ranks up there as one of the most insulting to a great many people but she also unwittingly allows us a peek into the cultural cocoon she finds herself inhabiting:

The error that progressives have consistently committed over the years is to underestimate the vitality of ignorance in America. Listen to what the red state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the sermons they flock to. They know who they are—they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence. The blue state citizens make the Rousseauvian mistake of thinking humans are essentially good, and so they never realize when they are about to be slugged from behind.

I bring up Ms. Smiley's essay here, not to dissect it, but to offer it up as a backdrop for a broader, and almost comical, analysis of the disconnect between the liberal elites and those who draw from the deep wellspring of cultures that they hold dear.

We've had substantive discussions about the murder of Theo Van Gogh and Islamic intolerance as well as some malignent Muslims acting on their intolerance but it certainly doesn't help our analysis to see the New York Times unwilling to even contemplate that Mr. Van Gogh's assassination could be a sign of a cancer growing within the Muslim community and instead indicating that the fault really lies with Dutch society and how it treats it's Muslim residents. Randall Parker's take on this matter also addresses the liberal elite echo chamber phenomenon:

Theo Van Gogh was killed because the centralized Dutch planning bureaucracy failed to make better plans! The idea never occurred to me. But then I'm not a left-liberal. Still, I'm willing to get on board with any idea that might help. Maybe the Dutch can hire some retired Soviet Russian government planners to help out. Government planning is the solution. Who would have thought it? Oh, only the editorial board of the New York Times. I applaud the comrades for their insight.

Oh left-liberals look at how far your political movement has decayed. How shameful your most prestigious media outlet, how pathetic, how incredibly invincibly ignorant and foolish. Western culture needs to be defended but you have become its enemies. No wonder Bush was reelected. Middle America knows the liberal elites are their enemies.

The positions of Ms. Smiley and the New York Times serve to effectively peel off more and more moderates from the cause of progressivism. However, while these echo chamber essays reverbiate among the literati and have marginal persuasive influence for the majority of the country, blatant attempts to re-engineer the touchstones of American culture will do far more damage to the causes that the PC elites hold dear than their countless essays ever will.

When the movie going public goes into the theater to see a re-make of I Dream of Jeannie what they'll expect to see is an homage to their cultural touchstones, as hokey and shallow as they may be in this case, and not a reinvisioning of the story:

However, in an interview with London's Daily Telegraph newspaper on Monday, Chadha said her version of I Dream of Jeannie would take the story back to the genie's roots in Persia in 200BC, and stated "She's a Muslim girl, and the story is about Muslims", so confusion reigns. An announcement on casting should be made soon.

Cormac and Marianne Wibberley wrote the script in which a young woman's quest to become a soldier earns her the punishment of being stuck in a bottle and sentenced to serve the first person who finds her.

I'm not quite sure how they're going to make Jeannie a Muslim girl in the year 200 BC, when Mohammed wasn't even born for another 770 years.

Now Ms. Smiley and her compatriots may be in for a surprise when they find that even more of those ignorant and hateful Red Staters are peeled away from moderate or progressive ideals after being subjected to the cultural re-engineering of watching a harem clad soldier girl who is a Muslim before her time, when all they wanted was to see whether Jeannie really had a belly button and the crazy antics poor Major Nelson would have to explain away to Colonel Bellows.

That this plotline could even be considered speaks volumes to me about the incestuous amplification that affects many of the adherents of Political Correctness.