Tag: Decline of Western Civilization

A New Year’s Eve Look Back in Gob Smackedification

photog Current Events, Trump , , , ,

If 2024 had been the plot for a novel no one would have believed it.  The former president is running for the Republican nomination while under indictment in four separate cases in three separate jurisdictions.  He is found guilty in two of them even before the end of the primaries and every time a court case goes against him his popularity grows.  The incumbent Democratic candidate wins the primaries handily but drops out a hundred days before the election because he sounded like a talking turnip during the only debate.  The Democratic candidacy is handed over to the vice president because only she can legally use the multi-billion-dollar war chest but she also sounds like a talking turnip, albeit a slightly higher pitched one.  During the campaign the Republican candidate is put on open display by the secret service to not one but two snipers, one of whom misses a kill shot by fractions of an inch.

The media and the US government conspire to hide the incumbent president’s advanced dementia for his whole term in office, going so far as to claim he is actually some kind of political four-dimensional chess master while video evidence proves he’s forgotten how a door knob works.  When the election can’t even be stolen through massive blue city fraud the media claims that racism and misogyny are responsible despite the large gains the Republicans make among women and minority voters.  And as a parting absurdity the people in charge of the White House start rattling off thousands of blanket pardons including the president’s bag-man son who was already found guilty for various offenses large and small and whom the president had sworn he would never pardon.

And on the other side, the once and future Republican president has allied himself with a whole retinue of unlikely allies and future cabinet picks including the richest man in the world, a scion of the Kennedy clan and other heterodox individuals who would normally be anathema to a Republican administration.  And finally, the greatest absurdity of all is that this president-elect is someone like Donald Trump.  An almost cartoon character.  A caricature of the American huckster.  A modern-day P T Barnum.  But the only Republican to be honest about how the American political system is totally rigged against normal Americans.

And none of that even mentions incipient strains of World War III filtering out of the neo-con madness in Ukraine and with the Middle East in virtual flames as Gaza, Syria and Iran boil over in open war.  Just the other day the explosion of a weapons depot was so huge that some observers mistook it for a tactical nuclear weapon detonation.  And so, with just twenty days left before the end of the Biden presidency there seems to be no pause in the frenetic madness that has engulfed the world stage.

Looking back on this, stuns the mind.  To me this is the result of massive overreach.  When the Democrats unleashed George Floyd, COVID and election fraud in 2020 they pulled out all the stops and ran Washington like some private fiefdom.  And they brought in a collection of misfits and weirdos that couldn’t get out of their own way.  And so, they blew up the economy and unleashed actual stagflation.  They hid the stagnation part by putting everyone and his brother in government no-show jobs.  But the inflation was right out there for all to see and feel.  They tried to tell people that they shouldn’t believe their own lying eyes when looking at their empty wallets but instead bask in the glow of Bidenomics that was making them rich.  Of course, unless you’re an investment banker, tech entrepreneur or tenured Ivy League professor you probably don’t have a seven-figure 401K plan to offset the order of magnitude growth in the cost of housing and eggs but then again poor people should just shut up and vote Democrat.  Right?

So, as it turned out reality really is real.  And now the good(?) guys have their turn at bat.

I think I begin to understand how things speed up during these end of civilization events.  Once instability sets in, unbalanced parts of the system start to randomly knock into each other and catastrophic collapse is more or less inevitable.  Well, I guess this thing has to play out.  Perhaps 2025 will be a chance to do maintenance on the system and get it at least firing on an even number of cylinders.  Who knows?  Maybe Trump will turn out to be a Diocletian-like historical character who comes up with a patchwork solution to allow the empire to limp along for another century or two before complete collapse.

Well, there’s my annual pep talk.  Happy New Years and I’ll put together a look forward for tomorrow.

Cultural Suicide

photog Current Events , ,

As the glaciers of the last ice age were receding, the Neolithic Age gave way to the beginning of what we call human civilization.  And over the course of the last ten millennia human beings have slowly and painfully mastered various technologies and attempted to live in more and more complex social structures.  But along the road from cave man to knowledge worker there have been several examples of a dominant local culture imploding for no apparent reason.  When this happens the surrounding cultures usually take advantage of the vacuum created by the collapse and absorb the lands, peoples and resources that are up for grabs.  We may be about to experience just such an implosion.

Our society; western civilization, the first world, the global community, whatever you want to call it; has become delusional.  And this has been a top-down process.  The elites who inform the academic world, specifically the Ivy League colleges and fill the ranks of the top corporations and the federal bureaucracy have formulated a moral order that has given us the George Floyd riots, pediatric transgender medical malpractice, unrestricted third world immigration into the first world countries and the rest of the woke ideology that we are presently engulfed in.

But even though this was started by the elites it has now percolated through the entirety of the younger half of the population.  And the poison of this philosophy has done its job.  The culture at large believes in things that make no sense and if acted upon will undo our civilization.  This is what a culture committing suicide looks like.  Adopting the self-hatred that the woke ideology prescribes for Americans guarantees that our society will cease to exist as it formerly was.  We are already seeing the fruits of the DEI approach to corporations.  Boeing’s airliners and space ships are falling apart.  Airline pilots are no longer selected and judged base on their ability to fly planes but on their skin color and sex habits.  The same is happening with surgeons and judges.  And what we will find is that airplanes and heart surgery can no longer exist in a world where pilots and heart surgeons are unqualified.  After four or five airliners crash who is going to fly?  Who is going to get a coronary bypass surgery when the survival rate is 5%?

What I don’t know the answer to yet is how does this play out?  I am starting to see some evidence that in some jurisdictions people are rejecting the DEI model and all of its effects.  Several states have already written laws banning things like transgender surgery and treatments for minors.  Some colleges have pulled back from the abandonment of standards like SAT exams for admission and other means of selecting for qualified individuals.

Maybe we will see a rejection of all the dangerous and dysfunctional ideas that have flooded our world with unqualified individuals running the mechanisms of modern life.  Maybe we will pull back from the abyss and regain some semblance of sanity in how we regulate our world.  We should have some clues to this soon.  One of the signs I would be looking for in a population retreating from the abyss would be rejecting the woke leadership.  And rejecting Joe Biden would be the clearest sign of that.  Biden has embraced all of the woke agenda and this has affected most of the American people catastrophically.  If the electorate embraces Biden, then I’ll assume that societal collapse is what is baked into the cake at this point.  Well, why should we be any luckier than the Hittites and the Romans?  Anyway, if Biden is the winner stock up on canned food, bottled water and bullets.  You’ll probably need them.

Sister Morphine

photog Current Events , ,

As I’ve said it’s always a bad idea to write a post at night.  At night the brain is tired and unlikely to give of its best.  The mood tends to be dark.

But here I am.

When you’re young, the world is a fascinating puzzle that you throw yourself into.  And the immediacy of your little neighborhood; your family, friends, work acquaintances and enemies, takes up almost all of your attention.  Sure, you notice things like recessions and wars because they impact you directly but as soon as things are resolved for you, your attention reverts to your little world.  And so, you are shielded by indifference from the spectacle of how our world works and who runs it.

So, it’s unsurprising that my familiarity with Joe Biden in the time before he was vice president was limited to the few times, he made the papers.  He ran for president long ago and almost immediately was singled out as third rate at almost everything except lying.  That was his only true excellence.  Plagiarism and misrepresenting his own achievements were his oeuvre.  This is what I remember about him from before he ascended to a larger stage.

Of course, since then he’s become a phenomenon.  As president of the United States, he’s the most famous man in the world.  He wields enormous power which he has used to impoverish his countrymen and immiserate whole areas of the world with his wars.  Knowledge of the sordid financial arrangement that his son Hunter Biden has perpetrated to extort money from foreign governments is ubiquitous.  Everyone has heard that Joe Biden is “the big guy” who skimmed 10% off the top of all of Hunter’s pay offs.  And the governments that he squeezed were places like Ukraine and China; authoritarian regimes that could pay for the influence peddling with no questions asked.

Now, this is all old hat.  There’s no end to the talk of Biden’s dishonesty and other character faults.  Everyone has seen the videos of him sidling up to children and women and pawing them and nuzzling them.  It’s extremely disturbing almost shocking.  But it’s old hat.

But here’s the thing.  What does this say about our society?  Do the stories about Biden and Clinton and Obama and their depravity mark our society as terminally decadent and tottering on the edge of dissolution or is this just the routine state of all societies?  Were all the presidents creeps?  Or have we reached a dangerous low point.

I guess I can’t claim I have a definitive answer.  I’d be interested in getting people’s opinions.  But I’ll give my opinion here.

So, human beings are extremely flawed.  And when handed incredible power and responsibility they can go off the deep end.  Jack Kennedy had many sexual dalliances while he was in the White House.  Bill Clinton had the Lewinsky scandal.  And both Clinton and Obama leveraged the contacts and probably the criminal evidence they possessed through the FBI to make themselves billionaires.  Therefore, there is a rich tradition of tawdry behavior by US presidents.

But I think Joe Biden is an order of magnitude worse.  Biden is an odious misfit that should never have come anywhere near the White House.  It’s as if a circus monkey had been appointed a municipal judge.  Sure, partisan politics will allow a lot of latitude with the selection of a candidate.  But this should have been a red flag.  Everything about him adds to a picture that is a caricature of a despicable creep.  With Biden we’ve lost even the illusion of honor.  I can only imagine what foreign dignitaries must be thinking when they have to interact with this demented wretch.  They probably wash their hands as soon as they can after shaking his.  Most of them probably make a point of leaving their wives behind on trips and I can only imagine what the female dignitaries experience when he comes in range.

So, I think we have dropped down a very long way in the caliber of our leaders.  Politicians like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi use their powerful leadership positions mostly to enrich themselves through insider stock trading which is a protected perk of the federal legislature.  And the president of the United States is bought off by one of the most corrupt governments in the world; Ukraine, to pay over a hundred billion dollars to finance a war from which no one benefits but the politicians and the merchants of death.

People will say that this is just the way business is done in an empire.  Caligula or Nero is just as valid a leader as Augustus or Marcus Aurelius.  As long as the army and the tax collectors do their jobs we’ll roll along for another few centuries.  I disagree.  I think the rot is advanced and has eaten its way through the other levels of the elite.  The managerial class seems to be far from the best and the brightest.  The universities have become clown college.  Even our supposedly state of the art information age corporations seem to lack initiative and inspiration to produce real innovation.

I think Joe Biden is a symptom.  But I think this symptom is one of those markers that are used in triage.  When a doctor notes this one, he sends the patient displaying it to the hospice for the morphine goodbye.

Upheaval and Disaster Stalk the Compound

photog Current Events , , ,

Several days ago, I called up my cable and internet provider.  I had previously received a cryptic warning about changes that would take place on a certain date and the equipment I would receive to allow for these marvelous changes to occur.  When the day of reckoning had almost arrived and no equipment arrived, I felt I had no choice but to do the unthinkable.  I would call my service provider up on the telephone.

This may sound like a normal activity.  I simply dial a number and I talk to a human being for a few minutes and communication occurs.  I remember when I still believed in such things.  Ah, those were the days.  Back when the cable guy would be sent to your house and install stuff and adjust things and telephone calls were answered by human beings or at least what sounded like human beings.  Wasn’t that an amazing time?

But now is not that time.  After dialing the number, I was greeted by the robo-voice giving me options in Spanish and English and so began my odyssey.  First in line was the repair/technical journey.  And this was the most straightforward part of the adventure.  They had contacted me.  They had told me what they were going to do.  They were upgrading the speed of my connection and so they had to send me higher speed equipment to take advantage of this upgrade.  And since my present equipment wouldn’t function after the change date, they had promised to send me the magical new equipment.  But where was this new equipment?  What had intervened to prevent my reaching the promised land of higher speed data transfer?

So, I selected Technical.  And then the dreaded canned music began.  It was as stultifyingly boring as anything I have ever heard.  After a mere ten minutes my skin was crawling and I could feel my resolve slipping away.  I was tempted to hang up and call back later.  But I knew the foolishness of such a cowardly act.  After all this was just the first round in what I knew must be an epic struggle to retain consciousness.  I persevered and after a reasonable twenty-minute wait I was speaking to a real live person.  And it was someone who sounded normal.  A woman who spoke English and was polite and understood what I was asking her.  It was too good to be true.  She understood exactly what was supposed to have happened and she only put me on hold for ten minutes while she reviewed the facts of my case.  I was ecstatic.  But what a fool I was.  When she got back, she was noticeably saddened.  She informed me that because my contract was very old the changes proposed could not be performed without transferring me to Billing.

My heart sank.  I had never been transferred to billing without suffering exasperation or even rage.  I have mocked and shouted at billing operators on numerous occasions.  I think it’s part of their training.  Here I was thirty-five minutes into the journey and I was being thrown off the parapet and into the dungeon.  I could hear in her voice just how guilty Technical felt.  It was as if she had given me a death sentence.  I said resignedly, “Okay transfer me.”  And the music began again.

I waited about five minutes.  It’s much easier to get through to Billing than Technical.  Then again nobody really wants to speak to Billing.  The people there are petulant, easily flustered, impolite and not very helpful.  Several times while I attempted to explain what I needed I was cut off by the rep.  And each time it was clear she misunderstood the situation.  Finally, after several system queries, she believed my side of what needed to be done.  She must update my contract to allow the normal equipment shipping order to go through.  The only thing that needed to be done to accomplish the update was to add five cable channels to my selections.  I told her to select them at random.  I didn’t care because I wouldn’t be watching them anyway.  But in an almost gleeful announcement, she told me that only a Specialist could approve the additional channels.  I would have to be transferred yet again.

I don’t think I cried out.  I think I staggered back a step or two.  I choked out the words, “Then transfer me.”  And the elevator music started up again.  I was a solid hour into the call and I knew that the wait for a specialist would be something between twenty-five and thirty-five minutes.  I put the phone down on a table and set it to speaker.  I stared out the window on a sunny fall morning turning quickly to afternoon.  Camera Girl walked by and heard the music and understood what was going on.  I could see she felt for me as a true and loyal wife should.

After the requisite half hour, the Specialist made her presence felt.  And she really was special.  She needed no information from me.  She methodically laid out the actions that she would take and the results that would follow.  She apologized for the problem and assured me that the upgrade would improve my service by a speed increase of 50%.  I was off the call in about two minutes.

An hour and a half.  This is the nature of our relationship to the companies that supposedly connect us to the world.  They erect barriers that punish their customers to avoid communication at all costs.  Remarkable.

And now I am faced with another equally maddening customer service nightmare.  My oil company also provides service on my heating system.  Or in theory they do.  A few days ago, we noticed that there wasn’t any hot water.  Because it’s been so warm for the last few days, we hadn’t noticed that the heating system wasn’t working.  I went into the basement and watched what was going on with the furnace.  When it called for heat the system went through its cycle but when it reached the point where the oil pump turned on it made an awful grinding noise and failed.  I called up the service number and told them what was happening.  They said they’d send a technician within from four to nine hours.  None hours later one showed up and after a couple of hours he had the system running again.  Apparently, a set screw had come loose in the coupling between the motor and the pump.

Hurrah, the system works.  Slowly, maybe, but it worked.  Then this morning, no hot water.  Wonderful.  Well, no shower but the promised four to nine hours later (well let’s just call it ten hours) the same tech is back.  But the news is bad.  Now it’s a part that they don’t stock.  And it’s the weekend.  And now I’m annoyed.  An hour ago, I hear the circulation loop running in the living room.  I run to the basement and see that somehow the heating system is running.  I run upstairs and manage a hot shower.  I’ve beaten the system, at least for tonight.  The weekend is sure to bring more tales of woe from the oil company.  Like the cable company they are there to make my life awful.  But this is the nature of the dysfunctional world we live in.  Customer service is a euphemism for customer abuse.  For them customers are supposed to be kept at arm’s length and prevented from costing anything more than the absolute minimum.  The idea that customer satisfaction is something that these corporations should strive for is laughable.

In both cases my providers are literally the only game in town.  Monopoly compels me to make the best of a bad situation.  Tomorrow I’ll install the new internet and cable devices.  I’m sure there will be numerous snafus.  And tomorrow I’ll begin negotiations with the oil company’s tech manager.  One way or another we’ll get something going.  And that’s the reality of life in Joe Biden’s America.  Satisfied customers are a thing of the past.  Now it’s stand in line and stop complaining if you know what’s good for you.  Welcome comrades.  Enjoy the hold music.  Next!

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 26JUN2023 – Not Forever

photog ArthurinCali, Current Events, Guest Contributors , ,

 

As we cannot see what the future holds for America, the historical record is the best we must go by. Numerous empires in the world have risen and fallen to ruin due to internal hubris, and my thought is that ours will be no different. All the signs point to decline, from moral decay in society and financial overstretch, to military misadventures overseas. Looting the treasury phase as Zman points out, is an apt description of what we are currently seeing. TPTB are more concerned with what happens thousands of miles away vs. what can be seen only a few states from our nation’s capital. How long can it continue? Another decade? A few weeks? It is hard to describe just how out of touch the ruling class is with the people they lord over. This alone might be a godsend as when the collapse finally happens (without a nuclear fireball, hopefully) there will still be pockets of sanity and quasi-civilization around the country. My current reading list includes a lot more historical instances of these periods; Weimar Germany, England, and France after ruling class collapse, and of course, the time of Reconstruction after the American Civil War. It will NOT be pleasant, nor easy during these times. Many first-hand accounts attest to this. But, I stay hopeful that a sort of rebirth can occur. We cannot be ruled by idiots forever.

Winding Down

photog Uncategorized , , ,

Lately I’ve been tired.  Too much going on.  Not enough time to get everything done.  And when I’m tired, I think of the strangest things.  Probably disorganized thought processes.  Probably just free association rattling around in my head.

But I seemed to see a parallel between the way I am feeling and our world.  Our civilization is tired.  It’s slowing down.  It’s like a pendulum that’s run out of momentum.  The original impetus that got it going has been worn away by frictional losses and its motion is ebbing away.  Soon it will stop.  And once it stops something different and much less satisfactory will take its place.  We won’t be marking time with the Newtonian clockwork precision of the pendulum.  We’ll measure it by the frantic beat of our hearts as we run in panic from one disaster to the next.

All signs point to decay and the law of the jungle.  The breakdown of law and order in the cities seems to be the new model.  The weak will be at the non-existent mercy of the savage and ugliness will be the norm.  This all follows the same pattern as past iterations.  Rome had its Marius, Sulla, Caesar, Antony and Octavius.  We have Clinton, Obama, Biden, Trump and DeSantis.  These strange monsters appear around the landscape and strut their hour before being replaced by the next monster.  The only thing that’s certain is that the progression is a devolution.  Each character outdoes its predecessor in weirdness and in the amount of damage it will do to its surroundings.

Look at the absurd cast.  We have the game show huckster.  We have the richest man in the world.  We have an ancient senile grifter whose bagman son is a drug-addled pervert.  Soon we’re sure to have a man dressed as a woman running the world.  And finally, we have the prospect that a superhuman artificial intelligence will commandeer our whole human enterprise and possibly pull the plug on all of us.

The more I look at all this the more certain I am that something has got to give.  Somehow, somewhere, a portion of this dying world will break loose and make a new start.  It’s just not reasonable to think that all the progress and energy that existed a generation ago has all been snuffed out.  A civilization that could harness the atom and send rockets to the outer planets couldn’t just lay down and die, leaving nothing behind.  Something will survive.

But I’m also very certain that the wreckage will be horrendous.  For instance, the American cities look to be an almost total loss.  Chicago is leading the way in rushing to meet its fate.  They’ve recently chosen a new mayor who ran on a defund the police subtext.  The recent murder of a policewoman by a couple of teenage thugs just highlights the new power structure in that city.  The criminals have the upper hand and the city government won’t challenge them.

So, the death spiral continues apace and it will get much, much worse before it can even begin to get better.  The only part that is difficult to predict is where and how a new civilization will appear.  Maybe it won’t even be a western culture.  China, India and a few other countries in Asia might hold the seeds to a future renaissance.  But in the short term we will have to go through the whole passion play.  Next up is the tyrant.  Who will be our Caesar?  Our Brutus?  Or maybe we’ll skip ahead and Hunter Biden will be our Caligula.  Only time will tell.

Death Trap

photog Current Events , ,

In my post yesterday I said I would evaluate how to know whether it’s better to stay in your blue state or move to a red state or even emigrate to another country.  Well, all of that is a big bundle of work that I’ve just begun to work on.  But one thing doesn’t take much calculating is knowing when you’ve reached the point where you have to leave.  And current trends make that determination clear.  With the situation around “transitioning” children to the opposite sex we have reached that point.  The fact that an industry already exists to provide drugs and surgeries to ruin and mutilate children provides unmistakable proof that we’ve reached that threshold where if this outrage isn’t rejected strenuously and decisively by our elected representatives then we are clearly at the point where Americans need to find a place that does not allow such madness to exist.  Even if this place is poor and squalid and has many terrible things going on.  The fact that it defends its children from monsters makes it a better place to live than a rich, modern, cosmopolitan place that doesn’t.

Think about it for a second.  If you live in a place like California, a grade school teacher or a social worker can decide that your child is transgender and then authorize a transition of that child even against your strenuous objections.  And if you stand in the way of this process, they can take your child away from you to do it.  Now how is that any different from Nazi Germany or Maoist China or Stalin’s Soviet Union?  It might even be worse.  At least those places needed sexually intact citizens to provide the next generation to increase the glory of the Motherland or the Fatherland.  And I never heard of a dictator who tried to change the Motherland into the Fatherland or vice versa.

No, we’ve reached the tipping point.  If transgender transitioning of children holds up in our country then you will officially know you live in a doomed civilization and should flee as fast as you can to a place that hasn’t descended into madness and evil.  I often kid about cannibalism being the marker we can look for to show us we’ve hit bottom.  Well, cannibalism is enlightened compared to this.  That is, assuming they’re not cannibalizing their kids.  Adults, especially, women are supposed to be empathetic about their kids.  In the past there were stories of parents laying down their lives to save children, even other people’s kids.  It’s supposed to be bred into us to favor the small helpless hope of the future that we work so hard for and spend the best years of our lives raising.  If parents allow this madness to swallow up their children it’s proof that our civilization has lost the will to live.

The idea that we would allow the unspeakable harm that they euphemistically call “gender affirming treatment” to be committed against innocent children is beyond criminal.  It’s a crime against humanity.  It’s a blasphemy against everything we hold precious.  It’s monstrous.

So, pay attention to what’s going on.  Yesterday Joe Biden said that transgender Americans shape the soul of America.  This issue should be the rallying cry for every normal person running for office.  They should run on this issue alone.  They should call out anyone, Democrat or Republican who defends this horrific practice against children.  It should be banged like a drum, day and night.  This should be the rallying cry.

And if we lose this one don’t worry about figuring out whether you should stay in this country.  The answer will be to escape as fast as you can from this death trap.

Never Waste a Civilizational Crash

photog Current Events , , ,

We live in the proverbial “interesting times” of the Chinese saying.  Joe Biden twists and wriggles in the slime that is his element, excreting lies into his surroundings as naturally as an octopus discharges ink to confuse its enemies.  Woke banks crash, even more woke crypto exchanges are revealed as Ponzi schemes and Biden will declare that unless he can raise taxes by six trillion dollars the United States will descend into fiscal anarchy.  I’m curious if Keven McCarthy has the cast iron stones it would take to call his bluff.  I guess we’re about to find out.

I read that Saudi Arabia and Iran have decided to bury the hatchet.  This rapprochement was brokered by the Chinese and is just another indicator of how the United States is no longer the center of global diplomacy.  China and Russia are now routinely consulting with the Indians and the Saudis about trade and energy and the United States is definitely an outsider in these discussions.  In fact, in many cases the consultations are about avoiding Washington’s meddling in their affairs.

The Ukrainian war drags on with Russia using cruise and hypersonic missiles to cripple Ukraine’s electrical grid and rail system in advance of the long heralded Ukrainian spring offensive.  Now that Russia is at the point of collapsing Ukraine’s hold on the regional rail and road hub at Bakhmut through a glacially slow encirclement action it will be more difficult than ever for the Ukrainians to bring up supplies and troops from the West until sometime in May.  The spring thaw will render anything but paved roads completely impassable for tanks and other heavy fighting equipment such as the Bradley vehicles.

Based on what I’ve learned from watching the winter campaign, the Russians are using a very slow advance in conjunction with massive artillery bombardment to pulverize the Ukrainian army one square block at a time.  Because of the Ukraine’s policy of contesting every square inch of territory the Russian artillery strategy produces continuous casualties.  And with the estimate that western artillery shell stockpiles will be completely depleted by sometime this summer, the Ukrainians will be in a very difficult position with respect to defending many of the larger cities in Donbass such as Slovyansk and Kramatorsk.  There has also been speculation around Russia attempting to occupy Odessa and possibly reabsorb the breakaway Moldovan province of Transdniestria.

Many people wonder how this whole thing started.  Well, all of this is the State Department’s brain child.  Along with the CIA they sponsored the color revolution in Ukraine and funded the buildup of weapons and bunkers that have brought us to the present conflict.  And even as they continue to antagonize a country with a massive nuclear arsenal, they consider this outcome a success.

And every day we are treated to the spectacle of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the rest of the cavalcade of clowns slowly destroying whatever is still left of the United States.  Rail cars full of toxins burn in American cities, Mexican drug cartels murder American citizens with impunity, small businesses are folding up and dying by the millions and local communities and their citizens struggle to pay their fuel bills and buy food.

I guess Joe Biden has adopted the same strategy that the Russians are using against the Ukrainians.  He will just use a constant bombardment of misery against his own people until they just collapse, roll up and die.  It seems like a winning strategy.  It’s agonizingly slow and painful but hey what the heck!  He has to fill up the year and a half until the next election and there’s no way he can fix all the stuff he’s destroyed.  He might as well finish the job and destroy the rest of the country.  I suppose if your life has been destroyed and you’ve lost everything, voting won’t be a high priority.  So, he won’t even have to do much voter fraud this time around.  A real win/win.

Aristophanes and the LGBTQ

photog Current Events , , , ,

All this historical comparison to 5th century Athens has made me jealous.  But instead of looking at the military and political similarities, I think I’ll compare the cultural revolutions that occurred in Athens and the United States.  And the primary evidence for the nature of the Athenian cultural change will come from Aristophanes comedy, “The Clouds.”

Rather than going back to the Greek original (for which my extremely rusty knowledge of the Attic comic dialect would be insufficient) I will use the text of Arrowsmith’s mid-twentieth century American English.  And this is fitting because I am also mid-twentieth century American in my origin.

The Clouds is the story of a wealthy but culturally traditional Athenian farmer, Strepsiades, who marries an aristocratic wife and subsequently ends up with a son whose patrician tastes are bankrupting Strepsiades.  In desperation to escape from his debts, he goes to Socrates’ School of Sophistry to learn how to flim-flam his creditors.  But it turns out Strepsiades is too old and adle-pated to learn the sophistic methods.  In desperation he forces his son, Pheidippides, to become a pupil at the school and learn the art of sophistic logic.  Or as it is described, “the art of making the worse argument appear the better.”  But once the boy is trained in the sophistic art, he turns his skill against Strepsiades and beats him when he dares to question the “genius” of some of Pheidippides’ literary favorites like the progressive poet Euripides.  And when Strepsiades complains of the impiety of dishonoring his own father Pheidippides uses his “logic” to prove to Strepsiades that beating his father is logical.  After Strepsiades admits the logic of his argument Pheidippides offers to prove that horsewhipping his own mother is also a reasonable practice.  But that is a bridge too far.  Strepsiades realizes that using the sophistic methods is a deal with the devil and he rushes to Socrates’ school and sets fire to it, to put an end to all the corruption.

During Pheidippides education we are witness to a debate between sophistic logic and normal logic personified as two fighting cocks.  During their exchange we learn that sophistry is completely immune to shame.  When accused of buggery, pederasty and perversion Sophistry laughs saying he’s being pelted with roses.  All such things are complements to the new way of thinking.  Sophistry finally defeats Normal Logic by proving to him that all the successful lawyers, politicians and poets are all perverted buggers.  Therefore, buggery is the successful lifestyle, QED.

Arrowsmith succeeds in putting the Greek into modern idiom but the ideas are all there in the original.  The traditional culture of the Athenians, which included filial and religious piety and a warrior tradition had been replaced among the young with an atheistic, materialistic philosophy wherein respect for tradition, the desire to compete for honor among fellow citizens or even the desire to just raise a family had all been replaced with a hedonistic imperative to eat drink and be merry with whatever money their parents may have accumulated.

The parallels between Aristophanes’ description and what we have in modern America are too striking to miss.  Besides the disrespect for all traditional virtues and heroes we also have the very pointed championing of sexual deviancy.  If this play was being written today, we could name the sophistry character LGBTQ and it would fit right in with Aristophanes’ dialog.  Look at this exchange:

Philosophy

And suppose your pupil, by taking your advice, is promptly convicted of adultery and sentenced to be publicly reamed up the rectum with a radish?  How, Sir, would you save him from that?

 

Sophistry

Why, what’s the disgrace in being reamed with a radish?

 

Philosophy

Sir, I can conceive of nothing fouler than being buggered by a radish.

I could just hear this kind of argument being put forth in National Review under the title, “The Conservative Case for Buggery.”

What all this tells me is that the path taken whenever traditional culture is subverted by an effete, materialistic, hedonistic and sexually deviant culture is essentially the same regardless of whether it is 21st century A.D. America, 1st century A.D. Rome, 5th century B.C. Athens or antediluvian Ur.  They go after the children and teach them that their parents are stupid and that the traditional rules are outdated.  And they tell them that raising a family is unnecessary and expensive so the better course is to feed their vices and live as a parasite on society leaving nothing after they die.  We seem to be in the midst of western culture succumbing to this impulse.  Like the Greeks and Romans before us we’ve lost the aspects of our culture that preserved and strengthened it.  I don’t know whether we’ll end up like Rome but at the rate we’re going it shouldn’t take too much longer to find out.  We’re rapidly reaching a crisis point.

And as for escaping this trap, Aristophanes had the right solution too.  Go to the school and burn it down.  Hopefully one day Harvard and Yale will join Socrates’ “Thinkery” in the actual ash heap of history.