The Power of Popular Culture
Chapter 2
The Decline and Fall of Popular Culture
What is wrong with America? Whether we are talking about television
or pop music or anarchy on the Web, whether we are discussing
the dubious values of all-to-many politicians, or the questionable
views of far to many journalists, American popular culture as it
has become has allowed all of this to happen. That culture has
greased the wheels of a runaway freight train, of American culture at
large,
now rolling inexorably down a mountain toward disaster.
Do we really want a nihilistic future?
For which the Republicans deserve a good deal of the blame, we need to be
clear about this. To speak of most Republicans is to speak of people
who relegate culture to inferior status in society, who don't much care
what happens in the arts except when there are occasional outrages
like "piss Christ" and the Virgin Mary portrayed as smeared with dung,
but otherwise gangsta Rap, criminal hip hop, heavy metal rock that
glorifies anti-Christian values, and everything else is just fine since,
after all, what matters is freedom and to hell with community and
family values except within the confines of the home.
What does matter is bean counting, making money, and establishing
a career, and if the entire culture falls apart and collapses, why is that
a problem? All of which is to chart the effects of the most superficial
political philosophy invented by the mind of man, libertarianism,
now part of the fabric of Republican thought.
It isn't that Republicans are stupid at the individual level. Just listen
to
various GOP legislators on C-Span some time; many are experts at
national security, of the operation of the stock market, medicine,
industry, trade, high technology, and much else. But culture is
completely excluded from their purview, as is psychology,
sociology, and objective history. Which is to say that about
all such issues, Republicans are flying blind. They have no idea
what they are getting into, they are babes in the woods for whom
all the "culture" necessary consists of whatever form of traditional
religion they happen to subscribe to, in nearly every case a form
of faith that is less and less relevant to the population at large.
Is it any wonder that in the realm of culture it is Democrats or their
Leftist fellow travelers who command the heights of power?
This is to speak of Hollywood movies, of TV entertainment,
of computer gaming, of the music industry, of the stage,
of education, even of literature.
Of necessity any critique of popular culture must feature the role of our
dominant political parties in contributing to the mess which American
culture
has become both because of the nihilistic values of the Democratic Party
and of the political Left more broadly and because of the sheer stupidity
-unawareness, cultural illiteracy, and disinterest- of the Right.
There needs to be a wrenching critique that overlooks nothing of any
consequence and that is as clinically objective as it is possible to get.
What intellectual tools do we possess when talking about such issues?
What smart ideas can we bring to bear in solving such problems.
(1) Not many. (2) Hardly any. (3) Just a few. If you picked
#1 or #2 or #3, you are correct.
How often do people refer to the adage "all men are created equal" ?
To be sure, this slogan is important to all Americans, it is enshrined
in the Declaration of Independence. It serves as a reminder that
in one sense we are equal. We each have -or should have-
the exact same rights. And the feeling of equality can help us
work together in communities. It provides us with the foundational
principle for American democracy. However...
Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute has this to say about
the subject, here slightly edited:
-------------------------
I believe that "all men are created equal" is a warm lie -- soothing,
but utterly false. Yet this is the heart of Americanism. Out of this lie
has grown "if all men are equal then how are we to distinguish good
from bad since all men consider their acts good?"
Christianity, of an American sort, and capitalist greed, have until now
largely held the absurdities of the lie in check. But [unfortunately]
Christianity
has weakened before the unfolding of applications of the lie (e.g., "all
sins
are equal" has become a derivative) which leads to 'my sin is no worse
than your sin, your sin is no worse than mine as a heterosexual' etc..
--------------------------
That is, and much more can be said about the limitations of the slogan,
clearly there are conceptual problems with the principle. We would be
unrealistic to take it at face value.
To return to the theme of equal rights, do we really have any such thing?
If you earn, say, $20,000 per year and take a $2 billion corporation
to court, how equal are you? It would be a joke unless you had
an unimpeachable video of the CEO shooting the mayor
with a .38 caliber revolver.
Are we equal in education? What chance does anyone have of getting on
the Supreme Court unless he or she graduated from an Ivy League school?
If you come from a middle class family there's a good chance you can go to
a college, but it won't be Harvard or Princeton. Well, there are
set-asides,
a few exceptions, but that's all they are, unusual departures from the
norm.
Are we equal in how good our choices are? Maybe it can happen, but it
hardly makes sense to say that a share cropper (some equivalent) from
the Mississippi delta with the most meager education will habitually make
as good decisions as someone from an upscale suburb of LA or Atlanta.
True enough, Mississippi did give us Faulkner, but against Faulkner are
a thousand other writers of every stripe all over the country.
There is a literary tradition in the South that partly compensates,
this is not a simple 2x+3y=10z equation, but the principle should be
reasonably clear. Some people start life on third base. Some are
fortunate to get as far as first base.
More to Cameron's point, a philosophy of "all men are created equal"
gives us moral relativism, doesn't it? If that is true, then we are
cutting
our own throats because we are throwing out morality. We may also
subjectivise science -as feminists and homosexuals do in the area
of so-called "queer studies" which demonizes all science itself as the
self-serving creation of heterosexual white males.
Of course, to believe that you would need to overlook the contributions of
_Marie Skłodowska-Curie_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie) , who
won a _Nobel prize_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_prize) in 1903 in
physics and another
in 1911 in chemistry, overlook _Ellen Swallow Richards_
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Swallow_Richards) who invented the
science
of "_oekology_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oekology) ," i.e., ecology,
later popularized by Rachel Carson, _Annie J. Cannon_
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Jump_Cannon)
the astronomer who gave us the O, B, A, F, G, K, M system for classifying
stars,
biochemist Gerti Cori who unlocked many of the secrets of the body's inner
workings and another Nobel Prize winner, ignore _Rosalind Franklin_
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin) whose findings
enabled Watson and Crick to decode DNA, and many other women scientists,
but I guess we can ignore all of that, can't we?
In an age of rising subjectivism all manner of things everyone thought
were
established so that we could build on them in perpetuity, objectivity is
being
questioned as if it was not a positive good. And more and more of what
we think is conditioned by newfound veneration of the self. As if all that
matters is what we feel, what we desire, what we want, no questions asked
-as if any desire is as good as any other desire.
It is important point to become aware of the hidden assumptions in the
ideals
we have internalized without a second thought in the process of growing up
and assuming mostly pre-set identities.
We had a flawed but very functional culture at one time. It was epitomized
during the Eisenhower years and had a Biblical foundation that carried over
much that was normative in society as far back as 1795, the best date
for the start of "Christian America" after the Deism and Rationalism of
the Revolutionary era had played out.
This era was anything but perfect but the choice to think about is Ozzie
and Harriet,
plus the Harlem Renaissance and Ivy covered college campuses where teaching
the classics and the best of the arts of the past was still treasured and
respected,
versus what it all became, today's free-for-all of anti-Christian (and
anti-Jewish)
values, a large subculture of black victimization and black criminality,
where
universities have become hothouses for Neo-Marxist ideas once advocated
by the Frankfurt School, where gender feminists deny the truths of
evolution
as understood by sociobiology, and where Muslims are invited in to wreck
what remains of the culture we once all shared.
There is no one magic bullet that explains it all. Yes, Cultural Marxism is
a
major factor, but so is Kinsey and his false data and bogus conclusions
about sexuality that the ignorant Supreme Court made use of in Lawrence
v. Texas to "normalize" same sex so-called "marriage," and so is a Civil
Rights
movement that has basically crapped all over the legacy of Martin Luther
King
in bringing us demands for the opposite kinds of outcomes he once fought
for.
After all, King was a Baptist preacher and the Left, which now champions
King,
is overtly anti-Baptist.
And King was highly critical of homosexuality.
All of this said, the political Right has few good answers, so few that you
would
be forgiven if you said that it has no good answers. And the libertarian
philosophy
that has thoroughly infected the Right is designed to disallow any good
answers
inasmuch as it is predicated on the theory of social atomism, the view that
there are no valid claims that the community can make on our lives, where
the highest good is "anything goes," where we are islands unconnected
to each other, where individualism matters far more than any concept
of mutual interdependence.
Libertarianism is also predicated on denial of the worth of religious
traditions
despite the fact that these traditions have mostly been tested in the
crucible
of thousands of years of human history. Which, not at all incidentally,
the science of sociobiology is telling us are far more true and good for us
than many people ever suspected.. Sure, some traditions make poor sense
and need to be jettisoned, but the Enlightenment conceit that we are
infinitely
elastic, that we are made out of rubber, that there is no such thing as
human nature,
and that reason rules our lives, has all been proven to be false doctrine.
And that set of doctrines has, in fact, ruined countless lives. We not only
need to become aware of our limitations we need to rethink just what
is and is not possible for us as people as we make decisions.
We need to rethink the entire realm of popular culture
and see it for what it is, in so many words the Devil's doing,
Satan let loose upon the world, evil now masquerading as the
highest good, few people cognizant of what is really happening
to their lives or in their lives.
Yes, such metaphor is over the top, it is excessive, and there certainly
are entire classes of exceptions, but using the language of evil and of
malevolent beings makes it all memorable and provides great clarity.
An overstatement followed by a correction allows strong imagery
to take root and be remembered.
Also, while in real life we need to allow for qualifications of many kinds,
it is ineffective writing style to focus on the qualifications, to pay more
attention to the details of the qualifications than to the thrust of the
argument you are trying to make. Good writing is part of good politics.
Still, qualifications matter. For example, there are exceptions to the rule
that today's television is an unmitigated disaster. Indeed, if the
discussion
expanded to include weekend programming all kinds of nuanced comments
would be in order. Yet the main point here would stand; mostly, by far,
television
is a huge waste of time. It is the popular culture medium par excellence,
of course, and in that fact is an important story to be told.
This takes us to a Ted lecture featuring a discussion of "you-are-there"
wearable technology that uses a human to enter various situations,
whereupon
the experience is seen online via social media. Viewers then pass along
ideas
to the human, although it is unclear whether these communications
are to be taken as commands or simply as suggestions for action.
In any case, here is a new technology that from its inception is designed
to be interactive with thousands or even millions of people.
Gee whiz.
And here is where a Radical Centrist critique of popular culture is
absolutely necessary.
A few propositions:
* Because something is popular in the realm of Popular Culture
does not make it good. It may be presumed to be good, it may be
held as an article of faith that it must be good because "the numbers"
can be seen as a potential market. But sometimes what is popular can
also be bad, or very bad. A bandwagon effect in politics may help elect
a complete incompetent to office, for example ______. Democrats will
transpose the name "Trump" while Republicans will transpose "Obama."
But popular products can also turn out badly, like Samsung smart phones,
and, of course, popular fads can turn out disastrously, too, such as
clove cigarettes which ate up the lungs of purchasers at many times
the rate of tobacco smokers.
* Popular culture itself may be bad, certainly not across the board
in every detail, but on balance and sometimes waaay out of balance.
Hence Robert Edgerton's 1994 book, Sick Societies, which argues
persuasively that by any kind of objective criteria some societies
are far better than others in terms of average crime rates, physical
health,
human rights, creative accomplishment, and so forth. That is, there are
failed states and there are failed societies -Yemen, South Sudan, Libya,
the historical Tasmanians who retrogressed in terms of technology,
and many other examples. Sometimes there are failed ideologies,
like Marxist-Leninism, which nearly forever ruined eastern Europe
and Russia. Yet at one time militant Communism had popularity
of its own across approximately a third of the world.
* Popular Culture, by its nature, tends to be ephemeral, what is "in"
one year
is "out" the next, devalued as outmoded, as yesterday's news, as
essentially
worthless because it has been superceded. Everyone who matters no longer
is interested in some pop culture rage and away it goes, never to be
seen again. That is, popular culture often is all glitter with no depth.
Except for the naive young who have no memory, many people
simply cannot take popular culture all that seriously because they
know that the craze du jour is just that, a momentary infatuation
with little prospect of lasting significance.
Anyone can think of exceptions to these rules; in the real world
there almost always are exceptions to any generalizations about a society.
However, it is difficult to argue against the view that television
presents
quality programming no more than a small fraction of any broadcast day.
Moreover, what television showcases reflects popular culture to an
overwhelming extent.
But we need to discuss far more than television. TV may be central to
a large swatch of Popular Culture but there are other venues and these
may also be very important, sometimes radio, especially as arbiter of
tastes
in music but also as a vehicle of conservative opinion (liberals have been
singularly ineffective in this medium), and like newspapers, still a factor
of
consequence for disseminating "serious" political ideas, tastes in
entertainment,
and local variations on national themes.
And there is the Internet -which means YouTube, Facebook, and social media
of many kinds, plus websites, blogs, e-mail magazines, electronic
newsletters,
and much else. However, not even this list covers everything. There also
is street art, there are concerts, stage plays, poetry readings, and so
forth,
including poster art, T-shirt art, literary publications, graffiti,
pornography
in its many variations, the content of e-mails, and so forth.....
---------------
This leads to the question: Where do most people get their ideas
concerning
what is right and wrong from? Where do social values originate?
In the pre-nihilist era the answer was fairly straight forward: From
religion,
from the schools which were generally based on religious values, or from
the entertainment business which, in that fabled era, also paid homage to
religious faith. This included Hollywood, which maintained a code of ethics
that passed muster with various religious groups, especially the Catholic
Church.
It is a ludicrous fiction that the Jews of California called all the shots
and
had set out to undermine American values.
The era of Hollywood corruption is "post-Jewish" and featured a plethora
of Communist sympathizers, especially in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
True enough, many of these Left-wingers were at least nominal Jews,
but they did not act at all like actual (observant) Jews.
Their "faith" derived from Marx and Lenin.
Then came the homosexuals, starting in the 1960s, determined to deconstruct
each and every value our society ever cherished, so that the nihilistic
"anything goes" mindset on which homosexuality depends could become
dominant. The Jewish years, epitomized by Louis B. Meyer of MGM,
were decades where Christian values in at least diluted form were the
coin of the realm, when Jewish song writers composed one after another
Christmas carol which then became screen sensations like _“Let It Snow, _
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQzlJRjXSGY)
Let It Snow, Let It Snow,” which was featured in the movie Die Hard.
Another successful carol with a Jewish composer, Irving Berlin, was
"White Christmas;" the Bing Crosby version sold more singles than
any other record in history until that time.
Other "Jewish Christmas carols" include “The Christmas Song”(Chestnuts
Roasting on an Open Fire), _“Silver Bells,_
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djfgoGAEU4E) ” and _“Winter Wonderland.”_
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE8D52xD4uw)
It was also the (very Gentile) Disney era of clean, wholesome
entertainment.
Those days are gone and all the hopelessly naive attempts by Evangelicals
to bring them back have been pointless. Most Evangelicals are so naive
about
culture that they don't know what they are doing and accomplish
next-to-nothing.
There have been Catholic attempts also, think of Mel Gibson's "The Passion
of the Christ." But what did that lead to? Hardly anything except
short-lived
interest in Gospel themes on the part of a limited number of people. And
how could it have been otherwise? It re-thought absolutely nothing for
the modern age, it was void of all original ideas, it simply re-stated
a very traditionalist view of the nature of Jesus as if "this must be true"
on the face of it, even though majorities have their misgivings and
doubts
-to the point of deeply rooted skepticism and disbelief.
Evangelical mentality reminds me of an episode in an historical
documentary
film about Bristol, England, after WWII. One of the men interviewed for
the movie -who was alive in the years when the city was being rebuilt
after the Blitz had demolished most of the town in the early 1940s.
The man remembered talking with his grandmother, asking her questions
about why so many buildings were still in ruins. Her reply was to the
effect,
"remember all those Luftwaffe bombers, they wrecked everything."
It was useless to argue with the woman; as far as she was concerned
"of course" the boy already knew the answer, "everybody knew."
Except that the boy in question was not born until 1950.
Many Evangelicals can be maddeningly just like that. It is incomprehensible
to them why everyone else does not see the world the way they do.
Worse, many lack the means to communicate their deepest beliefs
except through repetition of the same kind of formulaic doctrines
they grew up with and internalized in their youth, when they were alive
in a very different world and time of history.
To make things as clear as possible this would be a good time to repeat
a little story. It seems as if an Evangelical pastor was in his office not
too
long ago when a street person visited his church, seeking help. The pastor
was more than willing to be of assistance, he knew that ministering to
the "least of these," to the downtrodden, was equivalent to giving help
to Jesus,
himself. Yet the pastor wanted to share the Christian message and so he
tried
to explain something of what he was trying to do. "As it says in the
Gospel of John," he said, intending to continue, when the young man
interrupted. "You have a bathroom here?" he asked quizzically.
A lot of people in society are utterly clueless about religion. What they
"know"
may be no better than a smattering of Christmas fables, odd bits and pieces
about the Bible, and maybe (maybe) some information about leading
characters of historic faith, a few odd facts about Moses or the Apostle
Paul,
and that's about it.
Where were all the Republicans when public education was being emasculated
of all things religion? Actually many were complaining loudly that it was
time
to bring prayer back into the schools and to teach the Bible in classrooms.
Which, in one sense, could hardly be the least objectionable. But not the
way they intended, and everyone on every school board understood exactly
what Republicans had in mind: Turning public schools into Sunday Schools.
Teaching with the objective of conversion to Evangelical faith. They
literally
cannot imagine any other approach.
The issue was adjudicated in the 1962 case, Engel v. Vitale, which held
that
prayers in public schools constituted an establishment of religion. Then in
1963
a similar case, Abington School District v. Schempp, devotional Bible
reading
was also declared unconstitutional.
Which was pretty much where matters rested until the 1990s when Schempp
was revisited by a number of smart attorneys who recognized the fact that
Bible reading -if the book was investigated as literature or as an
historical
document- was perfectly OK as long as no-one was trying to use a classroom
as a church annex. Indeed, the Court itself had affirmed:
"[I]t might well be said that one's education is not complete
without a study of comparative religion or history of religion
and its relationship to the advancement of civilization. It certainly
may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary
and historic qualities."
The result of this fresh look at Schempp was the rise of classes in the
Bible,
mostly taught by former pastors, mostly in the South but by no means
limited to Dixie. And for a while these classes flourished. Among other
things
such courses allowed young Christians to demonstrate their interest in the
holy book and to make a personal statement of faith, even with the Bible
regarded as a non-religious document for purposes of public education.
But by the early 2000s these classes were in decline everywhere.
What had happened was that when a surfeit of ex-pastors were recruited to
teach "The Bible as Literature" the results were predictable. If in one
sense
you could ask, "who better to teach the Bible?" in another sense this was
the worst choice imaginable. No-one doubts the knowledge of pastors
about the contents of the book; just about all have been thoroughly
grounded in exactly that; they "know" the volume from cover to cover.
However, this is also to discuss an attitude towards the Bible that has
no place in public education, namely the view that the sacred text is
without error, that it teaches nothing but unarguable truths, and that
the only proper way to approach the book is with reverence.
What is not being argued is that the Bible should be treated as a
collection
of fables, or that it is horribly flawed from beginning to end, or that
it is essentially obsolete because it has been superceded by science
or Marx or the Rationalism of the 18th century philosophers
and their successors. Not at all. The figure of speech I like to use
is that the Bible contains on the order of 500 mistakes large and small
all of which ought to be acknowledged candidly. However, it also is
a repository of somewhere around 5000 truths, many of which are
essential to human well being and, this being the case, we are discussing
a book of inestimable value.
Not to mention the fact that the Bible has been central to Western culture
for most of the past 2000 years, central to American culture almost
from the outset of the United States itself, and its language and ideas
are intrinsic to who we are as a people. Indeed, American history
is literally incomprehensible without working knowledge of the book.
Bible studies in higher education rests on the premise, nonetheless, that
you cannot "privilege" the book in a secular school setting. That is, you
cannot
present it as if it necessarily is better than all other books, or that it
surely
was revealed by God, or anything else along these lines.
Actually, any kind of objective comparison to other ancient books
should leave little room to doubt that nothing else measures up to it
even if the Buddhist Sutras have genuine merit, even if the literature
of ancient Mesopotamia has great value in its own right, and so forth.
But as literature, plus as a repository of human wisdom, the Bible stands
alone for its qualities.
Yet for all of these observations, it is impossible to actually study the
book
with any kind of objectivity if you insist that it cannot be wrong about
anything, if you insist that verifiable historical facts are irrelevant
to making judgments about the book, or if you insist that it is desirable
to study the text with no reference to other literature of the times in
which
it was written, as if Assyrian prophetic literature is irrelevant to the
Old Testament, or as if the writings of Cicero or Plato are irrelevant
to the New Testament.
Indeed, what makes Bible study so fascinating to scholars is tracking down
the many sources of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, puzzling out the
meanings
of statements as they would have been understood when the various "books"
were first written, and trying to distinguish between the idealized
interpretation
of religion presented in its pages from "folk" or "popular" forms which, as
archeology has made very clear, could sometimes be very different.
Then there are all of the Bible's literary formats, from poetry to
historical
records to genealogies to novellas like Esther, to Hebrew philosophy
as found in Ecclesiastes, to the Gospels and Letters and apocalyptic
compositions like the Book of Revelation. The book is an education
unto itself -which generations of writers from religious polemicists
to Dostoevsky to Mark Twain to C.S. Lewis to Faulkner- who all
were students of the text and knew it as second nature.
But how much of this do pastors ordinarily comprehend? Precious little.
Such things have never been their focus of attention, indeed, nearly
100% of their attention is directed to the religious truths they perceive
as crucial to the text. Which is not "wrong," but which is out of place
in public education and which is just about guaranteed to miss the
inspiration that young people, starting out in their lives, might otherwise
find in its pages,
That is, for many students -and not only them- the usual way that the
Bible
is presented is as a Potemkin village, where all that anyone sees is what
is most obvious and most superficial and, to judge from hearsay, most
boring.
To put this somewhat differently, the Bible becomes a new book when
you study it while also reading Bart Ehrman or Raphael Patai or Savina
Teubal
or any of scores of other scholars. You are certainly free to disagree
with,
for example, Ehrman's Atheist conclusions, but his scholarship speaks
for itself and needs to be addressed. And you can also disagree with
Patai or Teubal, who make a strong connection between ancient Hebrew
religion and the spiritual traditions of Mesopotamia, but their's certainly
is a viewpoint that deserves serious consideration if for no other reason
than the evidence they present is overwhelming to the effect that the
Israelites
were not strict monotheists and were, instead, henotheists who venerated
a Goddess who appears in the Hebrew Bible (The Old Testament)
under the guise of the Shekhina, the Holy Spirit.
All of which is only to scratch the surface; modern-era Biblical
scholarship
is allowing contemporary men and women to see the religion of the past
in entirely new and exciting ways.
Which we very much need in an age where the Bible has been discredited
-totally unjustly- by nihilists who reduce all of human spirit to chemical
reactions, arbitrary customs, and childish fictions people have never
outgrown.
But we cannot outgrow religion, we can only displace one form of faith
with another -and when this happens a secular substitute
it almost always is inferior in every way.
Think of Communist veneration of the embalmed corpse of Lenin, his tomb
with all the trappings of a religious shrine. Or think of the blatant
worship
of Barack Hussein Obama as a 'Jesus' figure.
This is not metaphor, or is metaphor about as often as it isn't. There
really
are people who think that Obama is a modern incarnation of Jesus.
For sure, this is mostly to discuss Yellow Dogs, but once you meet
such people, or talk with them, there is no forgetting. Not to mention
copious studies in 2008 to this exact effect, epitomized by the
extravaganza
which was the Democratic National Convention that year, avec Greek temple
on stage, with ecstatic rhapsodies of praise for the candidate, and
palpable
reverence for the man from Hawaii / Indonesia and, after a fashion, Kenya.
However, that was never my view, not for one minute.
Most of this book focuses on the shortcomings of Donald J. Trump. There is
an abundance of criticism of the man, whom, while he has genuine talents
and a trove of knowledge, is even moreso clueless and lacking even basic
understanding of the tasks before him. He is out of his depth and deserves
all the informed criticism anyone can level at him,
But none of the critical remarks about Mr. Trump in these pages is intended
in any way to be taken as some sort of endorsement of his predecessor
in office. This must be made clear inasmuch as I am a political Independent
who has little use for either the Democratic Party or the Republicans.
So that this is unmistakable here is my view of Barack Hussein:
He is an incompetent, a Leftist political hack who disguised his Marxism
beneath
a veneer of florid rhetoric, and someone who was willing to undermine all
of
American culture through promotion of Islam while he was in office. Which
was
as little as possible. By one count, which seems authentic, Obama played
333 rounds of golf during his tenure, nearly all of those outings in the
company
of cronies from his past, not with politicos or scholars or different
kinds of experts.
Those who were busy worshipping their messiah could never see any of this
for what it was, bogus religion with negative value. For them, Obama was
the savior, the messiah, all the better for being black and thereby
ideally
representative of the proletariat.
Sorry, but for me, I will take Christianity any day, or Zoroastrianism
or Buddhism or Judaism or Hinduism or almost any other traditional faith.
Indeed, there is no comparison. Obama was a huge mistake for America
and a disgrace to the high office he held.
If there is any excuse for electing this unqualified charlatan, and there
isn't,
we can point to an educational system that is oblivious to culture and the
behavioral sciences, which has produced generations of cultural illiterates
who know almost nothing about history, sociology, psychology,
or anything else that matters if we want to have a healthy society.
A critique of Obama necessarily merges into a critique of the system
that made him possible.
What has been the effect of nearly mindless valorization of STEM subjects
-science, technology, engineering, mathematics- as if you don't really
need
to know anything of substance about culture since culture takes care of
itself?
Which is no different than saying that we should turn culture over to the
Marxists
and gender feminists, homosexuals and Muslims, and black racists, groups
that
comprise major parts of the coalition that supports the Democratic Party
year after year.
Obama was a product of that system.
But that system has other implications for us that do not reflect well
on the Grand Old Party.
Republicans, obsessed with money, and libertarians, obsessed with
their own version of nihilist values, are more then willing to concede
culture
to the Left because, for them, culture simply does not matter.
Is it really all that mysterious? It should be obvious why American
culture
is in the mess it now embodies. Culture has become a cesspool,
Yet it is from this cultural mess that most people derive their values.
And this being the case, exactly why shouldn't we embark on
a culture war to end all culture wars?
But this manifestly does not say that the conservative "answer" is any
kind
of good answer at all. Culture needs to be rethought from the ground up
and reconstructed. It needs to be rebuilt on a foundation that
has objective value, that puts families and communities first.
Which must mean a crusade against Hollywood, against the
TV entertainment business, against various forms of popular music,
and against the stage. For example, against that Broadway travesty,
"Hamilton," which distorts the values of white Christian America
in order the promote a diseased version of multi-culturalism
that cannot tell the difference between healthy communities
and sick societies, which seeks -quite falsely- to attribute
to the urban underclass and its dysfunctional values the values
of the founders of our republic "as if" Caucasians were some kind
of footnote to history that has no relevance today.
Is it any wonder that Hamilton is "all the rage" in New York City?
That is ground zero for everything that is wrong with American society
as it has become.
Only California is competitive.
Where do popular values come from?
Not from the "wretched of the Earth" even if the poor often are a willing
host
for diseased values. No, our values derive from a culture that has been
gutted
of its traditions, its religion, and its sense of right and wrong. But most
of all
the problem lies with a system of education that teaches values that are
anti-tradition and anti-religion. This is the war that needs to be fought,
and fought hard, to win.
This cannot mean any kind of return to "old time religion" often associated
with
the 19th century or even the 1950s. It has to mean the creation of new
forms
of religious thought, new paradigms of faith, which, however, build upon
functional traditions whenever possible. This is to discuss the equivalent
of
a new Reformation, or even something like the rise of Christianity itself
in the mists of history. But that cannot mean some sort of campaign
on behalf of today's so called "liberal" religion which, almost everywhere
it exists, is a failure -with ceaselessly declining memberships, with
ideas
that resemble nothing so much as warmed-over Marcuse or gussied up
milquetoast humanism made to appear as if it had enduring meaning.
What also is necessary is for liberalism itself, which now mostly exists
as a caricature of classic liberalism, to reinvent itself -purging
everything
from it that can be identified with concepts like Political Correctness
or Multi-Culturalism. Today's (ersatz) liberalism is pathetic and about
as defenseless before seriously Left-wing causes as is the naive Right.
The term for this sort of thing on many college campuses in our time
is the characterization of its acolytes as "snowflakes" -for whom
nothing should be said that isn't "sensitive," that must be ridiculously
inoffensive, and that detests anything remotely like
controversial free speech.
One example of what this is all about can be seen in the end of Larry
Summers'
tenure as _President of Harvard University_
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_Harvard_University) . Which wasn't
all that long ago;
he occupied that office from 2001 to 2006.
But Summers had the misfortune to be naive to 21st century Left-wing
politics.
He was a Democrat, part of the Clinton administration as Secretary of
Treasury,
and a party stalwart. But he had little patience for the inflated
pretensions
of black "scholars" like Cornel West and was unimpressed with the
unrealistic claims of gender feminists like _Andrei Shleifer_
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Shleifer) . The result was
a campus imbroglio during which hard-nosed Democrat Summers
was ridden out of town on a rail for his willingness to speak the truth,
namely, that the African-American cause has become nearly totalitarian
in character and that, just as sociobiology says, not to mention common
sense
and psychology, women are not the same as men and by-and-large
have different interests and talents. That is, women are rarely all
that concerned with the hard sciences or engineering and usually
prefer other kinds of professions to earn a livelihood.
Hence an enormous uproar for speaking a few obvious truths.
But how could Summers defend himself effectively? Like many professionals,
his interests were masculine as ordinarily observed in American education,
namely economics and administration, and what he knows about culture
almost any bright junior or senior in college knows who has majored
in the social sciences or intellectual history. What Summers needed to do
was fight a war against his detractors. But for that he would have needed
the kind of education he did not have, or would have needed the
intellectual
curiosity to do independent research otherwise. Instead he was humiliated
by feminists and black academics who knew a weakling when they saw one,
who could push him around with no worries about effective opposition.
Of course, in some settings you don't need to be intellectually
sophisticated.
Such as American politics.
--
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