Though his conclusion is couched firmly behind a pair of rose-tinted glasses, Ross Douthat in the New York Times looks at the South Park censorship affair and comes up with a perfect definition of decadence:This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that “bravely” trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.
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Competing interests inside the PC mind. Or maybe tendencies. Or simply tropisms. On the one hand, there is the impulse to show how brave one is by for instance, putting one of those "Darwin" fish with feet on one's Prius; this will surely stick it to the (hypothetical) Kansas creationist. On the other is the desire to show oneself to be open-minded by trashing one's own culture---"oh, that? the Indigenous X People of Y do it way better". In this case, reality intrudes in the form of threats of death from a very non-hypothetical movement with a very real taste for violence.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read this, I didn't see any rosy-colored spectacles, to tell the truth. More a sense of the author being appalled just as if he were a sane man. I think the "but they deserve it, right? don't they?" coda was some sort of knee-jerk nod to what must be true? because it sounds kind of like PCish? I guess smart people are capable of thinking for themselves after all, as long as they haven't been told what the current truth is.