|
VDH.....timely
Monasteries of the Mind
"When everything is politicized, people retreat into mental mountaintops — dreams of the past and fantasies of the future.
The rapper Snoop Dogg released a video shooting a mock-up of the president. Rapper Bow Wow wants to “pimp” the first lady. What a difference a few months make. Not long ago rapper Kendrick Lamar issued an album whose cover showed young rappers on the White House lawn celebrating the death of a white judge. He received an invitation to the White House (a cut from his To Pimp a Butterfly album was Barack Obama’s favorite song of the year). When Trump has lost the rapper vote, has he lost America?
There is now something called the “Resistance,” which by its nomenclature poses that its opposition to Trump is reminiscent of European partisan resistance to Hitler: Affluent progressives are now on the barricades to stop another Holocaust? Cities now nullify federal law in the spirit of the Old Confederacy. A federal judge doesn’t enforce federal law because he says he does not like what the president and his associates said in the past, during the campaign. Op-ed writers overseas wait eagerly for the president’s assassination. At CNN, Fareed Zakaria, wrist-slapped for past plagiarism, melts down while screaming of Trump’s “bullsh**.” Madonna says she has “thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.” All the insanity reminds one of the old Kingston Trio ballad:
They’re rioting in Africa, they’re starving in Spain.
There’s hurricanes in Florida, and Texas needs rain.
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls.
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles.
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch.
And I don’t like anybody very much!
Bad filibusters are now good ones. Vowing to kill, hurt, or remove the president and first family is hip, when it used to be felonious. States’ rights and nullification are now Confederate-cool. Free speech is hate speech. Censorship is a mere trigger warning. Assimilation is cultural appropriation. The nasal voiced thirtysomethings on the news, in their retro outfits of high-water pants and horn-rimmed glasses, impart worldly wisdom as our new Eric Sevareids.
When we all wish to be victims, there are too few oppressors to go around. Or perhaps the Boomer generation is going out in a fit of frenzied self-recognition: It enjoyed all that was given to it, did not accomplish much itself, and left a mess to its successors. Its metaphor is California’s Oroville dam: Aging greens believe that it never should have been built; but since it was, it came in handy for the good life; but no one should spend any money on its repair; but when it nearly fails, we were all warned that it was never a good idea. And so no more dams will be built for our children.
An increasing number of American don’t take all this seriously. And that’s not new."
|