Culture Coup

Today was a good day for the aims of this blog. Nothing was written here directly here until now. What  drives your host, the interplay of good argument, unfolded on the stage set by Richard Fernandez when he wrote a short tribute to the late James Arness:  “Marshal Dillon! Marshal Dillon!”

I opened my numerous entries there (you may want to go there to see the rest) with this:

This thread is filled with nostalgia and sentimentality. Thanks to Buddy Larsen for bringing up the musical "My Fair Lady" and thereby helped me bridge the gap to make this point. Honest sentiment was something GB Shaw, who began his career as a critic, worked to eradicate even as the wildly popular musical based on his play "Pygmalion,” (the musical version of which he blocked while alive) is filled with moving, elegiac tunes. Shaw would never have approved the heart-rending music let alone the happy ending that did a 180 to the ending of his play. He would not have liked Gunsmoke either.

But Shaw's political influence won the day as the papers hired only critics — under whose cultural tyranny my Baby Boom generation grew up with — who panned works of art that were filled with beauty or any strong sense of heroics — hence the rise of the anti-hero. This cultural Marxism is the cultural coup we find ourselves burdened with.

A few of us resisted, and so many fine works endured past the critics’ poisoned pens. Works such as It’s a Wonderful Life and Gunsmoke.

The danger is real that the fond memory of such creations may die with my generation commenting here today.

I ended (well, at this point) my discussion there hoping that YBR now understands why I commented there as I did. I worked to make it clear how vicious the attack the "progressives" have successfully made upon the sentiments that founded this great culture, with this:

YBR/93 Emotion without restraint is surely no more radical a concept than worshiping pure reason.

This addresses my point, and was Lewis’ from the start! He analogized the head as the center of the cerebral, the gut the center of feeling. It takes the heart to balance them. The progressives wished to remove the heart so they could remold the world to their liking.

They’ve largely succeeded by inculcating the lying flattery in the youth that their untouched virginal innocence (naivety is so ripe for the power-hungerers!) made them more pure than their forebears. “Self-esteem” movement ring a bell?

Thus we witness what happens from removing the heart and leaving nothing but cold thought driven by primitive wants at the site of the source of our culture (in Greece) and moving to take over everywhere.

The Left’s monstrous destroyers thus conditioned are poised to unleash themselves. These are now found where nobler — not perfect — men would have previously been schooled before those scheming pseudo-intellectuals you’ve named took over the culture.

If this captures for my readers some of the thoughts that have been troubling them, I'd surely like to hear it, whether in comments here or at Belmont Club, or via email. The thoughts expressed today were long overdue.