Who’s which, girl or boy? Beats the hell out of me.
Read the previous post first. Excellent minds befuddled by current events.
Now for a common mind unbefuddled. Ya know, everybody knows that everybody knows the depths. The unique arrogance of the elite — you know, Ivy, powerful, beautiful, rich, famous, etc — is that they’re too damn dumb to know this elementary fact. Worse, the elite think the depths can be overcome by force of IQ, money, and position.
Nothing overcomes the depths but life itself.
In this respect there are no alphas, betas, and gammas. Why I was struck by Mika Brzezinski’s condemnation of Miley Cyrus. Why was she so offended? Have to say I think because she’s an Evelyn Waugh heroine (early novels only). Different rules for the quality versus the hoi polloi. Her friends can have fuck buddies, abortions, and shallow parasitic relationships, because that’s the way of life at the top of the celebrity sphere. But girls from Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio just shouldn’t. Civilization would fail.
Mika’s a phony. Thinking she maybe wishes she hadn’t slept her way to wherever she imagines she is.
I wasn’t that pleased with Victor Hanson either. Stated my objections once or twice to his lack of understanding of pop culture. But he does enjoy descending like Gibbon with a classicist’s arm bar to wipe us all out.
Truth. Mylie Cyrus wore a bikini called “nude” that was nothing of the sort. She was just a girl wanting attention. Any man on the scene would have sent her back home with a message to grow up. She did nothing like Madonna’s Sex Book, her near X-rated movie, or her disgusting practice of cruising New York in limos looking for sex partners. Outrage? Really. If anything, she’s the reductio ad absurdem of stupid girls who don’t quite know what lascivious means.
No, I don’t dislike or misunderstand nostalgia. It’s just that we are where we are. Having a super-class of amoral plutocrats isn’t quite working for the, uh, common man and common woman.
We prefer, down in our lowly dens of poor iniquity, to experience sin AS sin, and ask forgiveness accordingly. We’re not fond of the trumpet as the voice of confession. You know. Maybe the whisper is better.
Or country singers. Maybe the ones who don’t rip off their tops or show off their crotches to everyone who wants to see.
Probably just me. An old man dreaming.
Judgy Bitch (a hilariously witty blogger I only recently discovered) had similar thoughts on the subject, though whether she thinks Miley was performing parody or self-parody I’m not entirely certain. Toward the end of today’s article she said, “It’s probably a whole lot of wishful thinking on my part to think Miley Cyrus just pulled off some very clever commentary on slut culture, but since I begin with the idea that women are actually intelligent and capable and self-aware, I can easily allow for the possibility.” Contra folk like Mika, who noticeably do not begin with that assumption.
My own guess is that Miley is approaching a meltdown of the sort we’ve seen many times in the past. A little parental involvement could divert from it, I think. Does that make me guilty of paternalism? Is that something to actually be guilty over?
“So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over–a weary, battered old brontosaurus–and became extinct.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge