I had to write this column before Election Day, but you won’t see it until afterward. Anyway, by now you’ve probably had enough
Even more important than elections is the condition of our culture. We can’t screw up our culture and expect that everything else will be okay. In fact, our politics and our economy are the way they are because our popular culture is a mess.
Movies, TV shows, music videos; best-sellers, worst-sellers, and comic books; big sports and little sports: this is our popular culture, most of which we like to call “entertainment.” This is what we pump into our heads every day, hour after hour. This is how we educate ourselves.
Most of our culture rot is first hatched out in our colleges and universities; later it gets loose. Years ago, we had literature professors teaching young people that a text has no meaning except for what you, the reader, think it means. Rather insulting to us writers, but that was never a consideration. First literature, then history, and then the social sciences: there’s no true truth, there’s only “your truth” and “my truth.” And the next thing you know, you’ve got some chupacabra addressing the Democrat National Convention and calling Hillary Clinton, former captain of the Bimbo Eruption Squad, the champion and defender of women who’ve suffered sexual harassment—and the crowd stands up and cheers one of the two or three most flagrant lies ever told in public.
If there’s only “your truth” and “my truth,” then nothing can be really true or really false, and you certainly can’t have moral truths or moral facts of any kind—and you’ve got an entertainment industry spewing out a movie like “The Neighbor”. In this 2016 monstrosity, every character in the movie is some kind of criminal or other and every problem is resolved by a bacchanal of violence in the climax. Not even gun violence: these folks, with plenty of special-effects gore, just bash each other’s heads in, repeatedly.
We sit and watch, and that’s how we educate ourselves. Especially if we don’t know a patent absurdity when we see it—a disability acquired by many in the course of a formal education in public school or college. Here it has become permissible for teachers, John Dewey’s “change agents,” to teach things that are demonstrably untrue, because there is no truth and the teachings serve a desired political purpose. Well, left-wing teachers’ unions desire it, at any rate.
Major sports are a big part of our self-education curriculum. They mine us for our money, without any other care in the world.
A National Basketball Association star can make millions, even tens of millions, of dollars; but a recent report analyzes the further adventures of some of these millionaire athletes. You’d be surprised at how many of them have lost everything they’ve earned, some in excess of $100 million. They lost it be turning to drugs, to crime, to child support payments for multiple out-of-wedlock offspring, or to just plain cluelessness when it came to handling colossal amounts of money.
These players, many of them, are swept up from the ghetto, given a window-dressing of a “college education” (LOL), and the very best of them are drafted into the NBA, showered with money in quantities they can hardly comprehend, and turned loose on their own—while the rest, the ones who never made it to the NBA, are simply discarded. We aren’t told what happens to them, but we can guess. Meanwhile, we sit there grooving on March Madness and all the rest of it, training ourselves to a habitual carelessness and ignorance—but who cares, as long as we get our entertainment?
Our culture revels in waste, violence, and perversion, and we are told it doesn’t matter. It’s only a movie, only a game, only our “erotic minorities” finally winning the acceptance they deserve, or only yet another political speech full of lies that we know are lies but do not care. And so we wind up governed by a power class so fantastically corrupt as to defy description.
This is the price we pay for disregarding God’s laws first, and then our own.
This is our diploma.
I have discussed these topics, and others, on my blog, http://leeduigon.com, throughout the week. Please stop by and read! All it takes is just one click to get you there.
© 2016 Lee Duigon – All Rights Reserved
