“You need to prepare sneak attacks on society. ‘Hairspray’ is the only really devious movie I ever made,” Waters boasted during his 2015 commencement speech at the Rhode Island School of Design. “The musical based on it is now being performed in practically every high school in America—and nobody seems to notice it’s a show with two men singing a love song to each other that also encourages white teen girls to date black guys. ‘Pink Flamingos’ was preaching to the converted. But ‘Hairspray’ is a Trojan horse: It snuck into Middle America and never got caught.
.. Conservatives, by contrast, never fought the culture war with the intention of winning converts. Instead, they simply watched their circles become smaller, older, and more exclusive. They reduced themselves to remnants of the Moral Majority and became more concerned with winning elections than winning the culture of the future.
.. He was part of that change, helping to bring it about, but he did it without ever seeming like an angry ideologue. “I always used left-wing politics, I love the Yippies and the comic terrorism,” Waters told the British Film Institute. “I think it could be effective today, you humiliate your enemies by comic terrorism, by embarrassing them, and doing ridiculous stunts and hoaxes against them.”
.. What’s more, “I respect everything I make fun of,” the filmmaker wrote elsewhere.
.. Conservatives hardly ever take on their peers in fear that they will be considered unfashionable, be disinvited for radio and cable news show appearances, and lose the chance at becoming the next established figurehead. The right needs its own brand of radicalism if it’s going to fight the culture wars from its new place as the underdog, the new counterculture. It’s not enough to create an endless series of pie charts about how the wage gap is a myth; conservatives need to create a moment that people will grab onto because it is interesting, fun, and has a purpose. No one ever started a chant because they read a pie chart.