What Does Our Society Value?

I get regular posts in the email from a group of columnists that call themselves the American Partisan. Today's post is by the author whose nom de plume is The Gray Man, and is entitled Escape The Ranks Of The Insane As Gray Man points out, there are fewer and fewer of those of us who see through the insanity that marks current "culture."

I was reading Drudge the other day and found an article that I will not link here, since the readers do not need to add another few points to their blood pressure. It is there is a person with severe delusions regarding their gender. I believe it was a woman pretending to be a man and expecting the rest of us to join them in there delusion, or else be labeled with some variation of bigotry. The subject of the article was dismayed that despite their decision to masquerade as a man, she was still having a monthly menstruation and was forced to buy a $12 pink box of tampons that had a woman (by all evidence, an actual one) on the front of it. In the article the mentally ill woman complained about the price, complained about the look of the box itself, complained about the “dysphoria” her monthly event caused her, and there was even a tone of surprise that I sensed. Surprise at the fact that the menstruation didn’t cease the moment this individual decided that she was now a man. NBC News of course thought this was newsworthy and ran it like a serious piece. That’s our media, and they wonder, they legitimately wonder, why at least 40% of the US population don’t take them seriously anymore.

Of course I can agree that seemingly every day there is something in the news that seems crazy, and that makes me wonder about how anyone can believe this stuff. After all, if they test what they are being told by comparing it to reality, it will soon become apparent that what they are being told is not true. But it was specifically what The Gray Man had to say about art that was shocking, and I am not easily shocked. I have long characterized much of modern art as a hoax being played on a gullible public. Now I see that it my be a deliberate plot to undermine Western art and culture:

The book “The Naked Communist” had 45 goals to destroy the US, in which “US” could really be seen as non-communist Western Civilization. Number 23 said “Our goal is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.” I was at the University of Florida earlier this year and saw a piece of “art” in an open area near some museums. The piece was simply three, long metal beams. Two of them formed an “x” and the other was propping them upright. That was it. That is art in our modern civilization. Recently I read that an art exhibit had a piece that sold for quite a lot of money. It was a banana duct taped to the wall. There have been several pieces of art made entirely, or mostly, from shit. Excuse my language here, but is that what our society, our civilization here in the West, values and holds dear? Shit?

One often hears the saying that "art is in the eye of the beholder." But people who say these things are promoting a lazy and intellectually dishonest concept of art. Art is, in fact, capable of definition, and can indeed have standards. In fact, it must have standards in order to have meaning. Art requires knowledge, discipline, talent and vision. The idea that a banana duct taped to a wall is art is frankly disgusting. The fact that most of the best movies today are remakes speaks volumes about the state of the movie industry. I often find 1940's music better that what is being written today. As for poetry, nobody reads it any more. One can hardly blame people for finding it obscure and indecipherable. Where is today's Shakespeare, or Tennyson.

Art is an inseparable part of any civilization. And great civilizations produce great art. I am not sure whether it's a matter of the chicken or the egg, but in any case, the state of our art suggests our society is heading into the abyss.