Brought on by viewing this year’s TCM Remembers.
When the day comes that Arnold Schwarzenegger ends up in one of these, there is only one line they must use as his epitaph:
“I know now why you cry. But it’s something I can never do.”
“Useful” is synonymous with “Replaceable”.
To the extent a thing is for use, it can be replaced by anything that does the same function as well or better.
It occurs to me that we are in such a strange position: we are, ostensibly, a non-hierarchical society (there’s no such thing, of course, but that’s what we claim to be), yet we are in fact ruled by a malleable class of ‘elites’ whose primary goal seems to be supporting each other while openly despising the rest of the country. The weird disconnect is that they are simultaneously 1). extraordinarily stupid, corrupt, and/or incompetent and 2). equally extraordinarily satisfied with themselves and effuse in their mutual admiration. They also apparently think that the fact of 2 entitles them to every benefit they would receive if 1 were not the case.
Rian Johnson’s a good example. Hollywood and the media journalists fawn all over him as a brilliant, daring writer and filmmaker, with banner articles like “Rian Johnson on crafting the perfect plot twist” published on the IMDB and so on. Yet he apparently thinks the answer to that boils down to “you didn’t expect it, lol!” (“See, you would expect that the forty-minute subplot that occupies most of the middle of the film would have some bearing on the plot or characters but surprise twist…!”). His writing is staggeringly bad on just about every level, but the Right People gush over it, apparently because it ticks off the right boxes. Appreciating his work is part of being in ‘the inner ring’ (as Prof. Lewis puts it).
All the while the rest of us kind of stare at them in fascinated disgust, like visitors at an insane asylum.
Except the ‘asylum’ in this case is every major societal institution.
The biggest mistake Conservatives make in dealing with Liberalism in all its forms lies in treating it as an intellectual problem. We take them at their word that their views are simply an exercise of reason. A philosophy, grounded in the intellect and subject to rational investigation.
It isn’t. It’s a religion. A religion that, as part of its belief system, claims to be the result of pure reason and science. What we are experiencing and have been experiencing for the past few centuries is not a crisis of philosophy but of mythology.
The other side keeps winning because, at least on some level, they understand this. We keep losing because we keep trying to play the game they say they are playing rather than the one they are actually playing.
One of the chief features of modernism is the urge to separate cause and effect; we either love the cause and hate the effect or hate the cause and love the effect. In our hubris, we think that we can have the one without the other, and so we create endless problems for ourselves.
I often hear people saying, in response to talk of how the world has deteriorated, that those who complain are nostalgic for a mythic ‘Golden Age.’ This is usually followed by comments on how [insert period here] was nothing of the kind.
This, it seems to me, has it backwards. That a given time was no Golden Age does not make the present any better. On the contrary, the less golden an age actually was, the more of more of an indictment that it seems so by comparison.
To take an analogy: the Brendan Frasier version of The Mummy is no classic. It’s a silly, stupid pulp adventure. That people look back on it fondly in the wake of the Tom Cruise version of The Mummy is not an indictment of their taste or memory; it’s an indication of just how bad the latter film really is.
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Prove All Things; Hold Fast That Which is Good.
