In the Clutches of Cultural Bankruptcy
American Philistinism and the Leftist Hive Mind.
I. The Left Are Not So Erudite or Cultured, After All
Those espousing leftist ideas and politics often entertain certain pretensions of urbanity, erudition, and cultivation. The vast majority of leftists earnestly believe they are better educated and more cultured than their political adversaries, just as they rarely fail to make such beliefs known to one and all. At a superficial level, this is not entirely without basis in fact or observation. Statistically, a larger number of Republican voters and “Trump supporters”1 are not college educated. Strangely, the left often takes mockery by Trump and others of such pretensions at face value: specifically, an exhortation as to how he “loves the poorly educated” is often taken at face value by those stricken with Trump derangement syndrome. That many on the left fail to pick up on the palpably derisive tone or that he is clearly mocking such arrogance should hardly be surprising. While this in turn suggests that many leftists are not nearly as smart or clever as they suppose, a closer inspection of the modern left—what is often derided as “woke” in Internet parlance and modern discourse—reveals that such pretensions are not nearly as well supported as these smug people would like to suppose. Very simply stated, the notion that the left are better educated and more cultured is largely a myth.
Perhaps more than any other indicator, one “tell” perhaps reveals the hollow nature of these pretensions more than any other: namely, how thoroughly and utterly embedded the modern left is in the very worst trappings of American popular culture, properly derided as American Unkultur. Party functionaries and supposed thought leaders alike as well as more particularly the plebeian masses that comprise the rank-and-file leftist are not only thoroughly engulfed in such cultural dreck, a large contingent of leftist discourse, to the extent one can call it discourse at all, is indeed defined by constant references to various elements of this Unkultur. A brief survey of leftist chatter in venues like reddit, or TikTok, or even holdouts on Twitter reveals a senseless and even mindless dialogue or stream of consciousness founded on nonstop, unremitting references to such dreck, from constant references to Star Wars, to the seemingly endless iteration of DC and Marvel comic book properties churned out as disposable but (usually) profitable films. Although a durable profit-center for Hollywood in a period of seemingly intractable decline, the latter is derisively referred to as “capeshit” in much discourse on-line. A perusal of established authors and writers in the publication circuit further reveals a deep marination in American schlock. As just one example, consider one essay examined by this publication, revealing a surprising fixation on the Netflix series Bridgerton by a supposed cultural elite. That essay, which condoned and justitified exposure of mature, sexual content to minors, was written by one Anya Kamenetz, an ivy-league educated Jewess who graduated from Yale and writes poorly written screeds for New York magazine. That her father (also Jewish) was an English professor underscores just how much those of supposedly elite academic pedigree are far more wanting in erudition and culture than their hollow pretensions suppose.
While such allusions pervade such chatter among the rank-and-file, it is constantly exhibited by politicians and elites as well. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one particularly instructive example of this phenomenon. Perhaps her most notable gaffe of all is the following statement applauding the dismissal of Tucker Carlson. Of course, the acutely vapid but always sing-songy puta would never make an allusion to classical literature or art. Instead, she likened the looming prospect of Tucker Carlson resurging to some “capeshit” villain:
Tucker Carlson is out at Fox News. Couldn’t have happened to a better guy. What I will say, though, is, while I’m very glad that the person who is arguably responsible for stoking so much anger, so much vitriol, and so much direct threats and danger to my life and to my colleagues’ lives is no longer at Fox News, I also kind of feel like I’m like waiting for the cutscene at the end of a Marvel movie after all the credits have rolled, and then you see like the villains like hand, re-emerge out to grip over like the end of a building or something.
It should be emphasized than none of the “likes” with which she stutters and that inundate this excerpt are typographical errors. This is an exact, precise transcription of her utterance. Her manner of speech, inundated with constant, repeated blurting of “like” used as a filler word is of course another indicator of this myth, especially as such manner of speaking and even writing is hardly an outlier among those of her persuasion. Such manner of speaking, which has infected how so very many of these people speak and write, further informs how devoid these people are from even the faintest glimmer or modicum of a classical education. Close observation of venues like reddit and other leftist strongholds reveals that such deficiencies are a hallmark of the left: constant use of the word “like” used as a filler, constant, unrelenting use—and misuse—of the word “literally” as a vague intensifier, as well as the peppering of certain buzzwords and slogans that suggest the leftist hive mind does not even resemble a large language model, as their script is far more shallow.
Newsom, unlike the insufferable brown bitch before him, comes from a wealthy, privileged background and even enjoyed a private school education. Are private conversations with Jennifer Siebel, forever tainted and sullied by Harvey Weinstein’s foul, Abrahamic seed as she may be, or among other elites at cocktail parties and extravagant dinners at French Laundry similarly reductive? Or is such drivel merely proffered as part of a calculation that knows its audience and panders accordingly to the Democrat constituency as it exists?
Although the answer to such questions is unclear, it is quite evident that such rhetoric is not only common, it is pervasive. Consider one activist woman in Minneapolis known as “somecallmelizzie,” real name Elizabeth Rose. ” This ridiculous woman became an object of ridicule among some right-wing influencers on Twitter for her unhinged TikTok videos. One video of hers makes a direct comparison of ICE agents to the imperial stormtroopers of the Galactic Empire in Star Wars. Another dubs a group of ICE protestors marching down the street with Katniss Everdeen’s monologue of defiance against President Snow and the Capitol2 in third installment of The Hunger Games. Deluded leftists in Minneapolis even designed a tattoo signifying membership of the “resistance” that incorporates a design featuring the Minnesota state bird, “the loon,” appropriately enough, with the “Starbird emblem” that served as the insignia of “the rebellion” in Star Wars. This design has been christened as “the rebel loon.”
Quite remarkably, these people quote and reference this cultural dreck with the reverence fitting of Homer, or Shakespeare, or Goethe. At least one shit-lib influencer even had the audacity to claim that the generic Marvel comic movie is the modern American Iliad. A brief perusal of social media content on the usual venues suggests the Starbird emblem from Star Wars has taken on quasi religious significance, not entirely unlike the Crucifix for Christians or certain runes for Odinists or those, such as myself, who are taken with Odinism for its philosophy of religion.
Leftist entrenchment in the throes of American Unkultur perhaps reaches the height of absurdity on reddit, discord, Twitter and so on, where the woke disseminate memes advocating a position through imagined association with a favorite comic, video game, or other fictional character, usually of an intractably juvenile sort. This tendency is typified throughout the modern left, from open-borders lunatics, transgender “people”3 and their allies, to those espousing leftist ideas in the abstract. Some of the worst offenders include the appropriation of G1 Transformers to convey a message for so-called trans rights. Particularly in the wake of the “ICE” protests and the shooting of Alex Pretti, leftists are circulating any number of memes depicting various comic book characters striking or even killing an ICE agent. Sonic the Hedgehog, a cartoon like character of a decades old video game franchise, seems to be particularly prevalent in this trend.
As some readers may know and as set forth in “Thrust Into It All: The Individual Defined by Culture and Circumstance,” I retain a certain fondness for G1 Transformers, largely if not entirely because of the time and circumstance I was born into by mere happenstance. Aside from demonstrating the phenomenon of Geworfenheit as postulated by Martin Heidegger and the illusion of personal choice , the only meme or other message I would ever incorporate this affinity into would be to tell transgender freaks and their lunatic allies to keep their “hands off my childhood.” Even so many years ago in Elementary school I could not imagine myself as a young child tying a particular policy position to the Challenger tragedy, the Lockerbie terrorist bombing, or the need to avoid nuclear holocaust amidst cold war tensions, or other issues that a child of the 80s might concern himself with at the time to some fictional utterance by Optimus Prime, Wheeljack, or Jetfire. And yet this is such a common occurrence among the leftist hive mind—among grown adults—that various edgelords and right-wingers have promulgated a series of memes mocking this very propensity.
Perhaps most comic of all, troons, pooners,4 and their assorted motley band of enablers and supporters are known to respond to “transphobic utterances” with some depiction of a purple, ogre-like witch character donning a blue and white striped witch’s hat, as illustrated below. Featured in the 2024 remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, this character is known as Beldam, who is one of the antagonists of one of the first transgender characters in gaming, “Vivian:” a shameless bit of pandering to the transgender menace. In their twisted, demented minds, referencing an utterly childish and indeed not just juvenile but infantile animated character in a video game is a meaningful and even devastating response to the number of arguments against transgender lunacy: a video game that should not appeal to anyone older than 12, and yet apparently appeals to many millions of stunted, mentally deranged adults. Citing the number of obvious and indelible tells of the sexes or myriad other arguments against transgender lunacy could of course never withstand the posting of an utterly juvenile image of a purple cartoon witch.
Such propensities should hardly be surprising when one considers the same deluded demographic has embraced a “stuffie” as one of its mascots: Blåhaj, which translates as blue shark. A certain style of fatherhood emphasizing masculinity in young boys from an early age posits that a boy older than about six or seven should not play with stuffies. That seemingly millions of adolescents and grown adults have embraced a stuffed animal depicting a shark as some sort of talisman is not only remarkable but truly unsettling. Such fixations of course reveal a mentality that is stunted beneath that of even a normal, well-adjusted child.
These and other auspices of modern left-wing ideology and the transgender menace most particularly help inform why such rabble embrace such batshit crazy, fantastical ideas. The notion that it is somehow improper or morally repugnant for the state to protect its borders and retain and enforce even modest immigration laws and policies is truly confounding after even the briefest reflection on such matters. The maddest notion that anyone could ever change sex (or gender) should not fool even a child, at least not in a sane, rational society. That the left routinely entertain and embrace such insane ideas is explained at least in part by a stunted mentality that cannot even be said to be trapped in perpetual adolescence. In normal times, no teenager would be caught dead with something so infantile as a blue shark “stuffie” or such depictions of a blue witch that could be cast on Barney the Dinosaur. In times past, even a freshman in high school would not have proffered imagined utterances by Spiderman or Sonic the Hedgehog to either bolster or repudiate a given policy position or argument. Nor, as set forth above, would children in elementary school. And yet millions of adults do in this sordid political and most importantly cultural climate. While these and other considerations underscore how very dire this crisis in culture is, they also bolster the blithe assertion that such persons simply must not be allowed to vote, must not be allowed to exercise political authority or agency.5
II. Culture and Unkultur as Expressions of Power
These propensities in turn inform several other important observations and insights. Perhaps the most obvious consideration is how deeply influential modern mass media is, how very influential American popular Unkultur is. This of course is by no means accidental, but something understood all too well by the left, or rather the thought leaders of the left and those who control such institutions. Conversely, it is hardly understood or recognized at all by the so-called right. Culture is an expression of power. This fundamental precept is exhibited throughout the annals of history, from depictions of the pharaoh-gods in the ancient tombs of the Pyramids, to murals depicting the impending fate of those offered as sacrifice by the ancient Aztecs and Incas, to the centuries of European art commissioned and sanctioned by The Catholic Church (and to a lesser extent protestant churches after the Reformation) for the purposes of proselytizing The Faith to the masses.
Just as it is exhibited, often quite crudely, in various examples of 20th Century propaganda art, so too is it exhibited in most all iterations of American popular culture. Indeed, there is hardly a more effective or harmful extension of American power in European culture and civilization than these very portents of American Unkultur that are infecting the cultures and languages of Europe. Every MacDonald’s in Europe and Germany most especially, every instance of English language advertising, every English language pop song infused into the collective consciousness of the peoples of Europe, from Bon Jovi, to Madonna, to Katy Perry and beyond stand in the service of Pax Americana. These and other elements of American popular culture advance, seemingly inexorably, the process of Americanization of European culture and society, degrading the languages of Europe and German most especially and infusing the very tenets of the post-war order into the heart and soul of Europe. Although varying in subtlety and nuance, as more recent examples have all the delicacy and manner of a sledgehammer, most instances of mass media popular culture of course promote and advance those insidious, civilization-destroying messages and ideas championed by the ruling class and the post-war “consensus” that democracy is the only way and that diversity and multiculturalism are our strength.
In addition to infusing programming and indoctrination into the minds of the masses through the various expressions of mass media and American popular “culture,” these efforts have achieved another feat, one much more subtle but perhaps just as important. So much of this pop culture dreck both evokes and instills deep affinity for being the outsider in the masses, as it touches on a certain romanticism and appeal to rebellion. It does this while simultaneously advocating exactly what is championed and sanctioned not, in fact, by outsiders, but the incredibly wealthy and powerful who harbor truly sinister designs for European civilization and its rightful posterity. In the original Star Wars trilogy, the Rebel Alliance of course was pitted against the “evil” galactic empire, which seemed invincible, unless engaged in a frontal assault. Katniss Everdeen and the impoverished slave-like citizens of the various districts are pitted against the appallingly decadent and evil Capitol. This is an oft observable trend in American consumerism, such as the mainstreaming of Harley Davidson, a major American corporation that somehow still sells the image of being a rebel and outsider associated with the American biker and even biker gangs while being one of the most powerful corporate entities in the United States.
The irony of course is that such programming deludes the rank-and-file leftist to believe they are rebelling, when they are in fact toting every policy position and every “good” political opinion endorsed by all the mass media conglomerates, all the American—nay, multinational!–corporations, and all the cultural and political institutions wielding unfathomable power, wealth, and influence. This important observation has been uttered before, but it bears repeating. It is a highly sophisticated maneuver of sorts, one that takes a propensity and admiration for rebelling, for speaking truth to power, and then turns that propensity as a force not against the incredibly powerful, not against insidious interests wielding unimaginable wealth, but instead uses that propensity in their very service. The affinity for rebellion, or rather the illusion of or cosplay as rebellion, is thus converted into yet another instrument for those very positions and ideological tenets advocated by the ruling class.
This effort plays on deep-seated traditions in the United States, harkening to sentimentality about the American Revolution, in which American revolutionaries, described as patriots, took up armed revolt against the British Empire and ultimately prevailed. These presentiments also touch on other touchstones of the American tradition, including the pioneers that settled the Western frontiers, the American cowboy, and so much more. This tradition is further romanticized in popular culture in figures like James Dean and Elvis Presley. They even explain how Holden Caufield as outsider foists The Catcher in the Rye into the status of an American literary classic, even as some question whether it is a great novel at all.6
The genius of this method of propaganda cannot be overstated. Just as one cannot see he is enslaved if he thinks he is free when he is not, the individual cannot rebel against powerful, influential interests endowed with unimaginable wealth if he thinks advocating for those policies positions and ideological tenets espoused by these sinister and above all powerful interests is somehow rebelling “against the man.”
III. American Unkultur, The Gruesome Wedding of Philistinism and Egalitarianism
In many ways, these propensities stem from how vulgar and uncultured American society is and likely was destined to be. To the extent that leftists are more likely to have a four-year college degree than Republican voters, these deficiencies stem from what leftist ideology and Cultural Marxism have done to academia and the institution of education more broadly over the decades. In the same way, they also reflect the peculiar sort of philistinism that largely defines mainstream, “normie” conservatism in American society. More crucially, this appalling state of culture is likely an inevitable corollary of liberal democracy, particularly in the new world without venerable, centuries-old institutions like the aristocracy, the universities, and even religion to serve structural support and facilitators of high culture.
As many are well aware, higher education, particularly in the United States but now also Europe has become a farce. This is especially true for the humanities, including English as well as foreign language departments, the history departments, and most particularly the gender and race studies departments that have flourished with the rise and subsequent dominance of Cultural Marxism in academia. Decades ago, it was possible to obtain a bachelor of arts in English without having read one of the three essential pillars of English literature: Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, although it would admittedly be difficult to get a degree without having read any of these. Over time, it is becoming increasingly rare for one to graduate with a B.A. in English literature with exposure and knowledge to all three of these pillars in the canon of English literature. A perusal of honors theses as well as PhD dissertations reveals a fixation on the holy trinity of “race, class, and gender.” A dissertation or for that matter a senior seminar on how Hester Prynne and the Scarlet Letter apply to Kimberlee Crenshaw’s intersectional theory on race and gender is the antithesis of any sensibility or affection for the letters and for culture as those terms are properly understood. And yet such is the state of English departments across the nation and in Europe, and has been with increasing intensity for several decades.
The American University has been made a mockery in other ways, most especially in how American universities have prostituted themselves as a minor league for sportsball, most notably the NFL and NBA. This perverts and taints the academic environment in any number of different ways, and is a key factor why many college students could hardly be regarded as scholars at all. This is compounded by the tolerance and even tacit support for Greek life, which has rendered much of college life something vaguely resembling a Bacchanalian orgy. Instead of the idyllic settings of the Ancient world, paint a most vulgar picture consisting of awful rap music, plastic cups for keggers and other booze, backwards baseball caps for men and fake tans for women. Very simply stated, in addition to ever diminishing academic standards and grade inflation, much of university life in America is not much more than an inordinately expensive baby-sitting service for middle-class and upper class, mostly white kids to binge drink, fuck, and worship that school’s sportsball teams.7
This peculiar sort of philistinism, of quackery, informs, at least to some degree, what the mainstream conservative mantra about “useless degrees” is about, but only in part. While the perversion and subversion of the universities and most particularly the English departments inform conservative hostility to higher education in part, many in the mainstream conservative set would retain such hostility even if universities were not so thoroughly subverted and ruined. Much of the hostility and disdain stems from a revulsion of intersectionalist theory and teaching seminars on comic books or pornography in relation to post-modern literary theory, but much of that hostility would remain even if universities were still a stalwart bastion of high culture, of the belles letters and the canon—that is if they were still teaching the “dead white males” with the reverence they deserve. It is also curious that much of the hostility towards higher education by the mainstream conservative set rarely denounces how sportsball, fraternities and sororities, and other components of college life have made the American university a travesty and a charade. This further informs the fundamentally correct view that American mainstream conservatism harbors a legacy of hostility to higher education and institutions of culture more broadly, and does so from conservatism’s own peculiar sort of philistinism.
These consideration in turn further explain why lefties are so wanting despite their pretensions of being better educated and more cultured. As is so very often the case, familiarity with the German language helps readers conceptualize important, essential concepts. As explained at length in “Against Democracy,” the German term Bildung denotes both a sense of being educated and being cultured. In this way, although modern shitlibs may be more or less educated, depending on how one defines the term, they are utterly lacking of Bildung: sie sind “gar nicht gebildet worden.” This phenomenon whereby those educated often do not exhibit even a glimmer of a classical education—that is of Bildung—is a direct result of how mainstream conservatism let Cultural Marxism and the left have free reign of the universities and other cultural institutions and centers of power decades ago.
Another crucial consideration is that America was always somewhat removed from those centuries’ old components of European culture. There was never an aristocracy (degenerate aristocracy, natural aristocracy, or otherwise) with ties to real history that spans the ages, to blood and soil, nor were there entities like the Catholic Church that commissioned art through the centuries, built the cathedrals of Europe and so on. As set forth in “Against Democracy,” one of the shortcomings of the framers was the failure to foresee advents in technology related to mass media. Nor did they foresee the need for safeguards to fortify and protect institutions of culture from sinister but powerful interests. As a result, in the early 20th century with the advent of moving pictures, newspapers, and radio, these institutions were developed and procured by monied and very sinister interests, and they were allowed to do so with carte blanche license.
This is compounded and exacerbated by how liberal democracy eschews hierarchy8 in its most abstract sense. The vote of a genius is just as valid as an idiot, after all. As Thomas Carlyle points out, Judas Iscariot is just as likely to prevail in a democracy as Jesus Christ, just as liberal democracy and hyper egalitarianism regard “the vote of a Demerara Nigger [as] equal and no more to that of a Chancellor Bacon.” Valuing only wealth, irrespective of who wields such wealth and how such wealth is procured, moneyed interests enter the vacuum left by these deficiencies. And with the advent of mass media in the 20th Century and beyond, culture is degraded from what it is and ought to be intrinsically to a means for these moneyed interests to make a handsome profit producing and selling schlock to the masses. All of this is done while propagandizing any number of harmful and deleterious messages with the hypnotic like trance with which modern mass media seduces the masses.
This dire situation is of course compounded by another, ancillary corollary of liberal democracy and the underlying, philosophical underpinnings on which it is founded on not just as a form of government, but as an ideal unto itself: just as any man’s vote is just as valid as another, irrespective of merit or native abilities or deficiencies, so too are matters of art and culture relative. Before the rise and supremacy of the liberal democracies, the proposition that some art, some writing, and in the modern age some cinema is objectively superior to others would be utterly uncontroversial. In this day and age, because each and every person is just as equal to another, this fundamentally correct and necessary postulation is most irksome to a vast majority. Just as each and every person is equal to another, so it follows that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem is neither superior nor inferior to Madonna, Katy Perry, Snoop Dogg, or Sabrina Carpenter. And who is to say that “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” or “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round” is not just as equal if not better than the Brandenburg Concertos or, for that matter, Closer by Joy Division.
According to this creed of hyper-relativism, of egalitarianism, nor is Goethe’s Faust or Shakespeare’s Hamlet any better than grocery store schlock masquerading as novels like those written by Danielle Steel or John Grisham, to say nothing of the explosion of gynocentric smut that has enjoyed great commercial success as women abide by increasingly wanton and shameless sexual libertinism and sexual profligacy. Indeed, many of a mainstream conservative worldview would argue the latter are better than the prior because of the commercial success enjoyed when offering such schlock to the plebeian masses. It of course also follows that Oath of the Horatii, The Death of Ophelia, and the works of Caspar David Friedrich are just as valid as art as the ugly street graffiti that mars American and now European cityscapes (thanks to the do-goody Allies), or for that matter the sort of acute charlatanism that has predominated the art world for almost a century or more. Under the prism of free-market capitalism as espoused by mainstream conservatism, the “art” of Thomas Kincaid is validated by the commercial success it has enjoyed precisely because of how truly philistine American society really is.
Western civilization is thus gripped by radical relativism as a categorical imperative, combined with a forfeiture of those institutions of art and culture to interests defined both by power and wealth as well as the most sinister designs imaginable. After a century of this or more, it should be no surprise that so many who fancy themselves as cultured and educated are so very deficient in matters of culture and erudition as those terms are properly understood.
Some insist right-wing views are antithetical to the arts, to the creative process and imagination. This is dubious upon a more expansive survey of Western culture. Caspar David Friedrich and Beethoven9 were liberal in a classic sense, and yet were fervent German nationalists. And let us not forget Richard Wagner. Thomas Carlyle, perhaps the preeminent proto-fascist before all others, was an immensely influential literary figure in Victorian England. Although hardly the sort of firebrand reactionary as was Carlyle, Matthew Arnold could scarcely be described as analogous to today’s left. Nor would John Ruskin. Somewhat more relevant to modern times, Ian Curtis voted Tory, and Morrissey himself has embraced fairly far-right views that envisage protecting and defending Europe and her posterity from third-world incursions and the evils of so-called diversity.
This comparison of great artists and writers before modernity informs that the sentiments and ideological underpinnings espoused by the populist, ethno-nationalist right are not in fact incompatible with art and culture. The key, defining factor is peculiar to the modern age and liberal democracy, most especially in America but also Europe underfoot of American hegemony. As has been stated before, it is this revulsion and aversion to matters of culture by American conservatism through the decades that left academia and institutions of culture effectively undefended from the evils of Cultural Marxism and other insidious elements that are now pervasive in our culture. Crucially, these and other factors and considerations create a term the Nazis rightly described as Seelenlosigkeit. It is this very crisis in culture—in Unkultur—that must be resisted and defeated if there is any hope in saving Europe and the West.
IV. The Manifestations of Unkultur Are All Encompassing and Inescapable
It should be stressed that the legacy of the degradation and subversion of culture that was allowed to take hold with seemingly no effective resistance whatsoever has led to total and complete immersion in the morass of Unkultur; no one is truly immune from the philistinism and vulgarity that defines modern culture and society. None of us are free from the philistinism of the modern age, free from the evils of American Unkultur, as even the best of us can only achieve a glimmer, a modicum of a classic education. As set forth in “Enveloped by Kultur Terror,” this author, like anyone, can never truly free himself from the cultural milieu that envelops us all. I despise, with every fiber of my being, most all portents of American popular culture, and yet I was utterly immersed in this Unkultur from childhood into adolescence and adulthood, as it envelops myself and each and every one of us throughout our lives. This means, like all Americans, that a deep and comprehensive lexicon of terms and allusions to this very Unkultur has been embedded into my brain: a processs that began in infancy, in much the same way that American English is embedded in the neuropathways and mental lexicon of my brain not just as a language, but as my unfortunate mother tongue. Dumb-dumb television shows like Dukes of Hazzard and The Price is Right are truly anathema to me, but if someone were to ask me to name an ideal brunette woman and to do so as the first name that enters my head, I would likely name Catherine Bach as Daisy Duke or perhaps even Lynda Carter from Wonder Woman: two sex symbols that all of Generation X was exposed to in childhood and early adolescence, and thus comprise a defining part of the mapping process that occurs during those critical, formative years.10 More names might come to mind if asked to name a blonde woman as an erotic or romantic ideal. Dian Parkinson or Priscilla Barnes in their prime would likely be on the short list, however, as they, too, were part of that mapping process during childhood, to put it mildly. A sick day likely included a viewing of The Price Is Right, and more particularly Dian Parkinson in all her not-so-understated sexual allure, just as reruns of Three’s Company in the evening presented the lovely Priscilla Barnes as utterly incontrovertible and truly convincing proof that boys do like girls. Other more current names might include Margot Robbie or Amanda Seyfried, but all nominations would emanate from the same, deep marination in this Unkultur that afflicts us all.
Just as any individual is a prisoner to the time, circumstance, and cultural milieu he is born into, these and author auspices and portents of American Unkultur are as much imprinted in our collective consciousness as an individual’s mother tongue is imprinted in the brain in infancy and through childhoodm. Just as Gen Xers (and succeeding generations) are necessarily and irretrievably embedded in these and other manifestations of the Unkultur, and have been since their tender years, consider how a German solider and later veteran fortunate enough to have survived the war might cite the likes of Marika Rökk,11 Zarah Leander, or Kristina Söderbaum as short hand for the erotic and romantic ideal in womanhood. Germanophilia and a deep, enduring, unflinching admiration and even reverence—hero-worship, even—for the Wehrmacht and a deep sympathy for the German perspective in both world wars may compel one to learn of these and other figures during this historical period, but they do not carry anything close to the same weight as sex symbols from the culture and time period I was born into.12
Consider further that, notwithstanding my utter contempt for the adult Star Wars fan, and despite the derision and scorn with which I regard the constant, unremittent references to Star Wars by the wokescold leftist hive mind, I retain a certain—and indeed involuntary—fondness for the original trilogy, and do so because they were part of my childhood. That fondness remains despite a conscious, rational evaluation that even the original trilogy is not truly great story-telling, or at least in relation to Episodes IV and V, is not nearly as great as one might expect, given how beloved they are by many generations of Americans. Indeed, had I been born in a different generation, I would probably loathe it.
Indeed, in many ways it requires a conscious effort to at least try and elevate discourse and eliminate such references in dialogue and discourse. Even though the prequels were awful, whenever the need for the sort of junta perfected by the likes of Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet comes to mind (a thought that occurs every day, and often several times each day), a deliberate conscious effort is, at times, required not to reference “Order 66” in regard to what needs to be done and must be done to save Europe and the West, so as not to sully discourse with references to such lowly, pop-culture dreck.
Moreover, despite this aversion to Star Wars dreck, using the Anakin Padme meme is conducive to building a larger following on social media (namely Twitter). In reference to Elon Musk’s declaration that American society needs to bring back asylums, (ostensibly in relation to transgender nutters and other lefty lunatics), this meme was created and posted in this effort:
As a brief aside, resistant viewing of the prequels informs more enlightened viewers that Anakin was of course right, not just in relation to the Republic that existed in that fictional world, but also most especially in relation to the liberal democracies that are destroying Mother Europe and the West: “the system does not work.”
These and other considerations reveal that the somewhat surprising philistinism that not only characterizes but defines the left is, alas, not exclusive to such rabble; it has infected us all. That infection is only a matter of degree. This, as with so much else besides, is part of a continuum. With the ever-devolving state of education in this country over the decades, and with the omnipotence of American film, music, and, if not literature, fictional writing as promulgated through mass media, no one is free from the spell of this appalling state of culture—or rather Unkultur!—afflicting the modern world. No one is truly immune from it. Rather, a select few merely attempt to achieve some modicum of what a classical education ought to be. David Foster Wallace asserted as much himself while decrying the state of the language arts and English instruction in this country, in which he correctly asserts that anyone educated after roughly the time this author was born will not be educated in grammar and language arts as when English teachers—as a collective—were deserving of the moniker: “In neither K-12 nor college, English” and the language arts, proper “grammar and usage” are “taught it anymore.” Stating it has “been this way for more than 20 years” since the publication of “On Authority and Usage” in 1999 over a quarter of a century ago, Wallace, if anything, does not give enough credence to how this “drives Prescriptivists nuts” as they cite this “as evidence of America’s gradual murder of English.”
There are of course other factors. The Internet and more particularly the ubiquity of the so-called smartphone has wreaked havoc on the attention span and ability to focus on most people. While books are rendered available in ways never before imaginable, that same technology has eviscerated the attention span in many that is required to read even moderately demanding texts. These and other additional factors compound the illicit and harmful propensities that are seemingly inherent in liberal democracy not just as a form of government but as an intrinsic ideal to itself. The modern age and concentration of more and more in urban settings and the displacement and estrangement that modern urban life fosters are also not exactly conducive to the ability to read and absorb Western literature with focus and attention, most particularly in the context of 50-60 hours of soul-crushing office job settings.
While these and other factors play a role in the abysmal state of culture—or rather Unkultur—the effective forfeiture of mass media conglomerates and indeed the very institutions of culture and power are far and away the single most dispositive factor, As set forth above and elsewhere besides, this realizations serves as an utter indictment of mainstream conservatism in America, as its own peculiar sort of philistinism conceded all the institutions of culture and education to the left decades ago. As a result of these and other gaffes, the vulgarity and stupidity of mass media and American Unkultur has become deeply embedded in our collective consciousness over the decades. None are more thoroughly engulfed in the various trappings of this shit “culture” however than the leftist swine in our midst, despite hollow pretensions to the contrary. A truly revolutionary mindset most fitting of the reactionary—and never the conservative—is the only hope of forging a new cultural renaissance rooted in the deep traditions of high European culture—replete with a look forward to a renewal through a new generation of artists and thinkers. Such a renewal must be defined by its rejection of both mainstream conservatism and the crass, thoroughly and irretrievably brainwashed leftist hive mind perpetually lost in a constant, unremitting loop of references to Star Wars, “capeshit,” and so much of the fetid excrement that is all too often the quintessence of American Unkultur.
https://theravenscall.substack.com/p/in-the-clutches-of-cultural-bankruptcy