The New Old World - Born Into This: Born Out Of That

Europe's reality, beyond it's stab at cultural post-modernism, is mighty scary to contemplate - they still keep hand grenades at home:

Europeans grew tired of watching overgrown boys marching around pretending to be soldiers, the silly uniforms, the incessant demands by dictatorial leaders that they reshape their lives and devote themselves – at all costs, at the cost ultimately of their childrens’ lives – to the nation. Today those memories are still so deeply etched into the continent’s culture that it is hard to make them disappear. Fascism remains close to us. Yet austerity does pose a threat to democracy today and so does the ethical blindness of too many politicians. New demagogues are emerging, promising endless false dawns and new orders, playing on undercurrents of racial prejudice that have never really disappeared. Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it, it has been said. That does not seem quite right to me. The greater likelihood is not mere repetition. It is that by lacking any historical perspective on our own times, we no longer remember what it is we should value and what we should fight to protect.

In other words, as we become more like them,...

 

Bluffing

"Read your pokerface? We can’t even see it any more under all that lace. Talent, it seems to say to her breathless female fans, is all well and good. But what it’s really all about is using your painted poker face (and poker legs, poker boobs and all the other hokey-pokery) to get yourself splashed on TV screens.

...artifice, not music, is her chosen art form. It’s ironic. It’s postmodernist. It’s Haus of Gaga, darling. Except that we’ve seen that conical bra before, thrilled at its subversiveness when Madonna wore it 20 years ago. A little pyrotechnics display tacked on just serves to emphasise its lack of cutting edge."

-- Hattie Garlick, commenting on Lady Gaga, and the ascendency of women in Rock, and how decent music has been lost in a world of artifice - just as a pretty face (or an ugly one) gets hidden under make-up or surgery - leaving us without one good song, as a sign of The Times.

Multiculturalism Won't Diversify

$150,000 Settlement for Black Public School Students Harassed by Other Black Students for “Acting White” (The Volokh Conspiracy)

"I'm not necessarily opposed to race-based proposals, I just think the premise of this one—'science is for white people'--is absurd and deeply counterproductive." (Townhall.com)

Top schools could be branded failures for failing to promote race relations (The Daily Mail)

What Ever Happened To The "Duke 88"? (Power Line)

"Obama and his friends preach tolerance, but there is bigotry at their group's core." (Brutally Honest)

Obama and Our Post-Modern Race Problem (The Wall Street Journal)

Yea: We've Got Bigger Things On Our Mind

"Are we sort of to be sacrificed in dribbles of twos and thirteens? The present status quo alternative of complacence is rather frightening and amoral in typically postmodern fashion. About every three months since 9/11 we have witnessed another foiled plot (23-4 by now), or a lone-wolf sort of attack on a shopping mall, Jewish center, military installation, or university campus (20 plus), whether a shooting or a run-over.

The apparent logic is that the plots will continue to be foiled (while we caricature the Bush illiberal Homeland Security policies that allow us to be so vigilant), and the lone wolves will kill someone far distant and in twos and threes, or as in the Maryland Sniper and Fort Hood cases, tens and thirteens—until another 9/11 comes around and for two to three years shocks us out of our pretensions."

-- Victor Davis Hanson, painting a pretty accurate picture of how society generally deals with spiritually-inspired and/or cult crime - whether it be the attack on Fort Hood or what occurred in James Arthur Ray's NewAge sweatlodge or death by homeopath, etc. - which at least shows somebody other than I can see it (whew!) including folks over at Pajamas Media.

Totally Cool

Hat Tip: Hot Air

Disco Sucks

"The drumbeat. It's always there. Day and night. Rain or shine. Winter or Summer. Sunday or Monday. It comes at you from every direction. It comes over the TV, the radio, at work, at school, in music, in the newspapers, from the politicians, in conversation with others, even in church. It wears you down. It robs you of the will to resist its message. Even short-lived victories, which stop it briefly, leave you with the knowledge that it will return; each minor victory bound to be lost to the redoubled efforts of this patient and persistent force. You can't escape it. It never stops. It never gives up. It never ends. It rains upon you from every possible angle, from every possible source.

It's the drumbeat of the left. It is political, philosophical, theological, and social. It pervades every activity. It is post-structural, post-modern, post-everything in the parlance of the day. It is tolerant, diverse, non-judgmental, non-discriminatory, egalitarian, politically correct, multicultural, globalist, and collectivist. It insists that there are no rights and wrongs, no moral absolutes. It turns everything upside down in its looking glass world. It denies the correctness of all that produced what our culture revered before the deconstruction of the world in accordance with the tenets of cultural Marxism."

-- William Staneski, getting sick of dancing around, and becoming the American Thinker.

Postmodernism: Change NewAgers Believe In

Asked to define sin, Barack Obama replied that sin is "being out of alignment with my values." Statements such as this have caused many people to wonder whether Obama has a God complex or is hopelessly arrogant. For the record, sin isn't being out of alignment with your own values (if it were, Hannibal Lecter wouldn't be a sinner because his values hold that it's OK to eat people) nor is it being out of alignment with Obama's — unless he really is our Savior.

There is, however, a third possibility. Obama is a postmodernist.

An explosive fad in the 1980s, postmodernism was and is an enormous intellectual hustle in which left-wing intellectuals take crowbars and pick axes to anything having to do with the civilizational Mount Rushmore of Dead White European Males.

"PoMos" hold that there is no such thing as capital-T "Truth." There are only lower-case "truths." Our traditional understandings of right and wrong, true and false, are really just ways for those Pernicious Pale Patriarchs to keep the Coalition of the Oppressed in their place. In the PoMo's telling, reality is "socially constructed." And so the PoMos seek to tear down everything that "privileges" the powerful over the powerless and to replace it with new truths more to their liking.

Hence the deep dishonesty of postmodernism.

-- Jonah Goldberg, playing the hand they dealt him, over at USA Today.

You Can't Make Your Own Truth (But I Can)

"It's postmodernism as intellectual radicalism - if you're on the Left politically you have to believe in all of this. There are other traditions of being left-wing which respect the facts, which don't believe the world is simply what we believe it to be, that think if you're going to make political arguments, you have to have evidence to support them. I want to reinstate that kind of rigorous, realistic Left liberalism. Postmodernism is addling the brain and wasting the time of some our brightest young people."

-- Gavin Kitching, self-professed "left-wing" professor (and author of The Trouble With Theory) for The Australian

These kids today, I tell you.

The Unted Front Against Bullshit (I Like That)

"[Susan] Jacoby informs us,...that she can think of no better example of why the right is never to be taken at face value in their discussion of the 60s. How does this logic work, one wonders? Would it be equally acceptable to take a claim about the 60s from a left-wing author with which one agrees and derive from its supposed truth the conclusion that one can think of no better reason to always trust the left?

Jacoby doesn’t entirely fail to criticize the left. She recalls time spent in the Soviet Union that made her understand and appreciate American liberty. She admits that the left has politicized junk science and fostered trends within academia that serve to trample over reason and quell healthy debate. She notes, in particular, certain strains of feminism. But how, one wonders, can there be a discussion of American unreason that fails to confront the wooly-headed postmodern philosophy that dominates literary theory classes and much political discourse of the left? Noam Chomsky managed to say that the British journalist and blogger Oliver Kamm’s criticism of him showed that he was complicit in state crimes — this from a man touted so often as “the world’s greatest living intellectual.” Scan the index for mention of Chomsky’s name and you’ll find nothing."

Jacoby is fond of asking how a person living in America today can know X and not Y, how they can value things so valueless while failing to appreciate the most precious — but mostly how they can fail to criticize glaring transgressions against reason and good sense. Great questions, but they might be posed to her as well: the track record of the American left in recent years has blemishes at least as hideous as those of the right, but that track record is not met with nearly the bluster that she gives to what she repeatedly refers to as “the right wing.”

The repetition of these words wouldn’t be nearly so disturbing if they weren’t so common in the text and if they didn’t so outnumber the appearances of “left wing.” One gets the sense that, for Jacoby, referring to something as “right wing” is an epithet, which is a problem for anybody hoping to approach a book like this for a sober assessment of what wrong turns America has taken since its inception as one of the grandest — and most successful — experiments of the Enlightenment. As one who is generally disowned by “the right wing” for being a snarling liberal and by “the left wing” for being a neocon apologist for imperialism, I have always taken a great refuge where category is concerned in Robert Conquest’s recommendation that, rather than beating worn-out steeds to death, we should forget about left and right and seek a United Front Against Bullshit. Jacoby’s book most certainly offers invaluable ammunition to this Front, but there are unfortunately times where it feels more like an attempt to revive those horses and ride them into the partisan sunset. In those moments, the book seems to miss its own point, leaving the Front to once again lament its frustrating dearth of firepower."

-- Josh Strawn, writer and musician, reviewing Susan Jacoby's The Age Of American Unreason for Pajamas Media.