re: #127 goddamnedfrank

I can be really harsh about this stuff, but I still pity these folks.

They were raised on Eisenhower-era pablum that glued together mild flavors of nationalism, capitalism, and Christianity. The revised “American Dream” was presented as the product of individual effort, not larger forces in the world economy—and certainly not about international conditions or stiffing African Americans (again). Both parties used to traffic in this tripe trope.

Basically, we built a cultural mythology in which doubt was discouraged and “America” was tautologically Good, but didn’t fill in the important details about how, and why, and how much effort it took. A fable, a hagiography of a nation. Sort of like the sonno joi types that Made Nippon Great Again—you hack the culture for a generation, suddenly everybody thinks the new way of thinking is the way it always was (and will be).

The cultural blocs that define the GOP all peddle versions of the same formula: we are America; everyone different is attacking. It defines the Christian right, it defines the Bircher paranoids, it defines the hawks, it defines the free market weirdos. It’s a slow-motion version of a stab-in-the-back myth, and worked for the same reason: it took an existing folk devil and brought it up to date.

Red Peril, Yellow Peril. Giant Negros, dirty hippies. Satanic Panic, Lavender Menace. These things never died, they just got repackaged over and over. Now they’re being wrapped together like Chipotle ingredients to make even crazier consumables.

Most people don’t have an immune system for culture; even educated ones, even liberal ones. It’s just taken for granted that the worldview is Reality, that the narrative is History. And white people are especially susceptible, because for five to six hundred years their hegemony has been based on a cultural teaching that theirs is the objective understanding of the world. And “Western civilization” as a construct makes them further vulnerable, since it teaches people they’re part of great chain of erudition and thought…even though they aren’t actually thinking, or educated, about Enlightenment ideas about humanism, empiricism, et cetera.

The symbol overtook the substance a long time ago. The minute any mediocre dude could see himself as a vessel of “civilization” and wielded that sense of superiority against another (likely brown) person, this shit was set in motion.

You can watch presumption and hubris based on the above just rip through liberal and progressive notions like fucking PacMan. Movement atheism got eaten by semi-literate internet dudes with lady issues and drastically overestimated calculations of their rationality. International socialism routinely own-goaled itself by not listening to brown people pointing out that not everywhere worked like Europe, and had European problems as per Marx. Look at how the anti-feminist blob has appropriated history and “philosophy” to polish their turds. The brogressive types ultimately fall into this pattern when they start talking down about race and gender issues, as does anyone who uses Marxist terms the way Jules from Pulp Fiction quotes Ezekiel 25/17.

Ideas as bower bird decorations. MacLuhanism eats itself.

Fuck, I should just go listen to Morissey and have done with it.