Sunday, April 27, 2008
Culture War
Culture War
Declared! ...again.
I must admit I haven’t had a great deal of experience with the Northeast. It always reminded me of those rat experiments psychologists were so fond of around the middle of the last century, where overcrowding led the poor beasties to chewing one another’s little feetsies off. Kinda like those Big Brother-type, crowd - everyone - into - a - tiny - house - with - 24 - hour - video - cameras shows. It engenders odd behavior.
So, Mr. Hirsh, who built your house, grows your food, fixes your indoor plumbing - and your car Pious, ... Must be kind of an odd feeling, as a Pragmatist, to look down your nose on someone who can kick your ass best you in any contest of practical skills…
In the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee led an ill-advised incursion into Pennsylvania. ... One hundred and forty-five years later, the South--or what has become the South-Southwest--has won another kind of Civil War. It has transformed the sensibility of the country. It is setting the agenda for our political, social and religious mores--in Pennsylvania and everywhere else.
You mean those poor dumb bastards clinging to their guns ‘n’ Bibles out of bitterness at the inability of bureaucracy to make their lives Utopian? They’re setting the political agenda?
Hirsh then points to the cultural influences that kicked a girl off American Idol simply because she sang “Jesus Christ Superstar”—not because she sang it badly, but for the choice of the song, itself.
In the delicate balance of forces that have always defined American tastes--nativism and yahooism versus eagerness for the new and openness to innovation--art, or at least high craft, it seemed, had triumphed. But our national common denominator of taste is so altered today that the blasphemous dimension of “Jesus Christ Superstar” now trumps the artistic part. And somehow, no one is surprised.
I’m surprised. But, then again, I’m no American Idol fan, so I have no rational guesses at all.
But the phrase that sticks with me is this one:
nativism and yahooism versus eagerness for the new and openness to innovation
Guess I’ll hafta change my tag to “Nativist Yahoo from The Country™,” because I can see a great deal more daring and belief in the potential for human innovation in than those who set out to explore frontiers than in those that stayed behind in comfort and consistency.
In part this is a triumph of demographics. ... the nation’s population center has been “moving south and west at a rate of three feet an hour, five miles a year."
Makes ya wonder: are they leaving for a reason?
... the “radical nationalism” that has so dominated the nation’s discourse since 9/11 traces its origins to the demographic makeup and mores of the South and much of the West and Southern Midwest--in other words, what we know today as Red State America.
No pissed-off, nationalistic folks in NYC on September 12? Oh, yeah—I must’ve just seen those yahoos who make up the PD, the FD and the plumbers, truck drivers, and other ‘simple folk’ to be found doing the work the elites refuse to do.
This region was heavily settled by Scots-Irish immigrants--the same ethnic mix King James I sent to Northern Ireland to clear out the native Celtic Catholics.
Ya mean Rednecks?
After succeeding at that, they then settled the American Frontier, suffering Indian raids and fighting for their lives every step of the way. And the Southern frontiersmen never got over their hatred of the East Coast elites and a belief in the morality and nobility of defying them. Their champion was the Indian-fighter Andrew Jackson. The outcome was that a substantial portion of the new nation developed, over many generations, a rather savage, unsophisticated set of mores.
Is “Savage, Unsophisticated, Jacksonian Nativist Yahoo Moron from The Country™ Clinging to Her Guns and Freedom” too long?
Traditionally, it has been balanced by a more diplomatic, communitarian Yankee sensibility from the Northeast and upper Midwest. But that latter sensibility has been losing ground in population numbers--and cultural weight.
The coarsened sensibility that this now-dominant Southernism and frontierism has brought to our national dialogue is unmistakable. We must endure “lapel-pin politics” that elevates the shallowest sort of faux jingoism over who’s got a better plan for Iraq and Afghanistan.
erm… I thought that symbols were sophisticated vessels of Cultural Values and “words have meaning.”
Barack Obama seems to be so leery of being identified as an urban Northern liberal that he’s running away from the most obvious explanation of his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and former Weatherman Bill Ayers: after Obama graduated from college he became an inner-city organizer in Chicago, and they were natural allies for someone in a situation like that.
Oh, I dunno—even this Savage Yahoo™ got this natural alliance.
We routinely demonize organizations like the United Nations that we desperately need and which are critical to missions like nation-building in Afghanistan.
I’ll pause here until you can stop laughing. ...until *I* can stop laughing.
On foreign policy, the realism and internationalism of the Eastern elitist tradition once kept the Southern-frontier warrior culture and Wilsonian messianism in check. Now the latter two, in toxic combination, have taken over our national dialogue, and the Easterners are running for the hills.
Ok - back that truck up. Ya mean Woodrow Wilson? The one who bragged that his WWI efforts contained “not a single selfish element?” Whose War Industries Board, Committee on Public Information and American Protective League worked diligently on the “transvaluation of values” for which war provided the opportunity?
That’s the Wilson you attempt to lump in with “frontier warrior culture?”
The younger Bush went to Andover, Yale and Harvard, but he rebelled against the ethos he learned there. The transformation is complete, right down to the Texas accent that no one else in his family seems to have. Bush is a Jacksonian pod person.
To those with “diplomatic, communitarian Yankee sensibilities,” to whom multi-culti tolerance is a rallying flag, this is the “sophisticated” level of compassionate comprehension for someone who disagrees with you? “Pod person?”
Still, something deep and basic has changed in our country. ...I dipped back into the Adams-Jefferson letters. ... What does seem foreign to us today is the dedication to free thought and, even more, free moral choice that so dominated the correspondence between those two great minds.
Oddly Predictably enough, I see it differently. From out here in The Wild West, it seems that those pursuing the “chilling of dissent” using invective, personal attack and attempts at outright gubbmint censorship are the Progressives scoffing, mocking, name-calling and Fairness Doctrining the Conservatives—excuse me, The Redneck Yahoos—into silence. This article exemplary among those efforts.
Another well worn tool in their bag is that most confusing, Projection. While shouting the loudest about “restrictions on my Free Speech” [then, how can I hear you shout?] they work the hardest to stifle others’ speech. While clamoring that we are “an intolerant nation, and that’s what gets you elected” they seem completely incapable of respecting that theirs is not the only valid opinion in the world. In fact they work overtime [at union time an a half wage] to make sure any differing opinion is not met with rational, fact-based argument but with emotion-based derision that corrodes the very concept of free thought. It makes the head spin.
The addiction of the “patrician, diplomatic, communialist Yank-ees to self-praise makes the floor sticky, as well.
...this change is also attributable to the rise of the mass media and the eclipsing of the patrician culture that produced both Adams amd [sic] Jefferson. “Both the New England Yankee and the old Southern colonel are gone,” he says. “It’s a battle between folk cultures, and it seems the Jacksonian is the more dominant.” It’s not a clear-cut victory, but the South has won the day.
I think it’s clear he is not referring to the MSM/nooz media, of whose bias I am sure he would approve, but the prevailing ‘pop-culture’ media. It comes down to the “patricians” vs the “rubes.” Again. But this time, the Marxists consider themselves on the other side.
Heat up the iron and pass the board. It’s gonna be a looong, wrinkly August.
I don’t give so much attention to this article for it’s supposed brilliance: this self-styled patrician is so ignorant he couldn’t find the floor with his hat. I think it’s noteworthy because it states all the elements that we’re bound to be beaten over the head with all Summer long. It’s The Narrative.
And it ain’t exactly new:
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