Post-America's exaltation of the ugly

Pamela Geller has a piece at The American Thinker today that is one of those "the-encapsulation-of-everything-I've-been-trying-to-say-in-all-my-work-as-a-pundit" essays.  She starts out ruminating on the cultural significance of the smiling-excrement emoticon, and expands from there to a reflection of all that it symbolizes:

Post-9/11 America, and especially America in the Obama presidency, is a different world from America as she was before Obama, and before the left started its long march to destroy this nation.  America today is increasingly anti-freedom, anti-truth, anti-ideas, anti-capitalsim – anti-reason.  A nation built on a morality of reason has all but abandoned its foundational principles.  Public schools and academia produce zombies – goose-steppers like the Hitler Youth – who are militant and violent in their imposition of the leftist/Islamic agenda.  And when they do it, they congratulate themselves about how they have stood up against “fascism” and “intolerance,” when the intolerant fascists are they themselves.  Intellectually, young Americans are the most docile conformists, no matter how vocally and self-righteously they declare themselves free.  They have accepted as dogma all the philosophical beliefs of their elders of the hard left without question or exploration.  A continuing negation of life and self.

The culture is ugly.  The music is ugly, violent, and misogynistic.  Every crime drama and suspense series is rife with the most unimaginable gore.  Game of Thrones, Law and Order (Sex Crimes), American Horror Story – they’re all devoid of humanity and morality.  Devoid of goodness.  It’s a cultural rout.  It’s not that the line between good and evil has been blurred – it’s nonexistent.  We are living in a cultural free-for-all, or more accurately, a free fall.

Pain, blame, victimhood are the ideals.  When Pharrell performed his confection of a tune “Happy” at the Grammys, he was compelled to turn it into a dirge.  A bright, happy, sparkling little jewel of a tune was accompanied by ugly political rhetoric and costume, #handsup, hoodies, and a porter/bellman costume for Pharrell.

In-your-face crudeness is not just to be found among rubes.  Geller points out, and even provides pictures of, jewelry and shoes from Bloomingdale's and Bergdorf Goodman sporting the poo icon.

The inability to recognize beauty and the innate nobility of the human being is now a given for the emerging generation:

A culture that would love such a thing is incapable of true humanity and love.  Hollywood is incapable of writing or producing a Casablanca.  There are no adults anymore – just petulant children who know nothing but to scream that they know everything and to heap contempt on anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their liberal fascism.  Logic and facts are scorned and derided; myths (global warning, “Islamophobia”) and feelings are held up as fact and science.I was watching a movie not long ago, a dated fifties musical short on Turner Classic Movies. It was bursting with life.  The kids in the room wanted me to put on something gory, negative, dark, and I said, no, no, watch this, this is great stuff – this is America.  And one of the teens replied, no it’s not, that’s from when America was happy.  And that struck me.  It hit me like a ton of bricks.  The left has worked so hard to make us miserable, and has succeeded.

I have mentioned before that I am an adjunct lecturer in rock and roll history at a community college.  I run into the phenomenon Geller is describing every semester.  The younger students' eyes don't really light up until we get to about 1967, when the drug use, undeniably a significant feature of American music since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, came out of the closet and became an overt feature of what was being created.  It's only from that point on that they can readily relate to what I'm presenting.

And this is what we're up against, a task even more daunting than haranguing Congress to stop the machinations of the jackbooted executive branch and its arsenal of regulatory agencies.

Culture, to reiterate an oft-made but still-crucial point, is upstream from politics, and a clear way to rescue it from these dark forces is not readily apparent.