On Facebook, Bob Murphy has presented a scenario that annoyed him:
… was at a restaurant in the Boston airport. It was very relaxed, just a few customers. My bill was for $14.85, and I paid with a $20 bill. The waiter gave me a $5 bill as change, then sauntered back to talk to the bartender. Discuss.
My take on Facebook: The young waiter probably can’t do simple math unless he closes the till, or something. The Korean young woman who mans the dry cleaners I frequent does all calculations in her head, as quick as a whip. Just as we were taught at school back in the day (I’m old, I know). Okay, be a pedant, Rob. You wanted a bill (as in an invoice). You wanted the agency to control the change you gave. But this is US youth you are dealing with. The other day, checking out at a big-box store, the same sort of simpleton insisted that the product I was purchasing (I told him the per-unit price) looked too expensive. There was no arguing with this hubristic creature. He would not check himself. He ended up shortchanging his employer to the tune of 90% of the item’s total price. I wanted to pay full price, but the young man kept shouting me down. “No, this looks too expensive to be true.” I knew this was an expensive item. He would have none of it.
Look, the adults who employ the youth adulate them, and do not wish to correct them. That’s been my experience. So let them live with the losses these pests incur.
Postscript: Meantime the Korean-owned dry cleaners I visit is making a mint, as other such establishments close down in my vicinity. The owner values every penny; he employs a sharp cookie to front his business. She’s sweet and genteel too.
The “case that Hollywood is liberal” is hardly novel or new, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg observes about Ben Shapiro’s book “Primetime Propaganda.” I’m not even sure that getting “a whole bunch of liberal Hollywood muckety mucks to confess their very liberal agenda” serves to out these shameless idiots.
However, there’s more to it. Does Shapiro enunciate the fact that on a meta-level, Hollywood’s increasingly impoverished scripts, with few exceptions, have indeed created a parallel reality, one that is increasingly reflected in real life (say, in the workplace)?
*Gender junk: Woman is brawny, brainy, and beautiful; man is a buffoon. An 80-pound waif manages to wallop a 200-pound gangster with no punctures to the silicone sacks. Her hulking cop partner trots after Great Woman obediently, and is forced to endanger his life to compensate for her lack of physical prowess in police work, firefighting, etc. As in “The Killing,” normalized is the dysfunctional life of the anemic, morose midget of a female detective, while her decent male partner, who ought to be her boss, is cast as the out-of-place brute.
*The canonization of kids and critters. In Hollywood’s case, America’s kids, who’ve never been dumber, are deified. The depiction of the natural world is a cartoon, festooned with errors and ignorance and plain delusions.
This Idiocracy was at work, I believe, in the film “Rio,” in which parrots, who resemble only humans and primates in their unique, brainy ability to manipulate objects with their adorable, human like digits—are depicted as having the claw-configuration of a common bird. Here my T. Cup is manipulating a toy block and reading Reisman’s Capitalism. (T. Cup has since grown his flight feathers and acquired 30 words, including sentences used in context, a feat Hollywood types would find hard to accomplish.)
Such was the ignorance of those who put this film together (and they call conservatives stupid?). Hollywood may mirror the cretinism of America at large, only many times amplified.
*General affirmation of slut and celebrity.
Alas, judging from their Bio information, too many Facebook friends who call themselves conservatives or libertarians profess to favoring movie and TV programing that does all of the above. Other than their penchant for FoxNews, the programing these Facebook friends favor and support is the most perverse of Hollywood programing (in terms of some of the parameters above).
My impression is that unless a protagonist is against G-d or for abortion, conservatives are culturally deaf to the piffle spewed by Hollywood pea brains. What’s more, conservatives are obsessed with Hollywood. If they were serious, they’d write Hollywood off—stop writing about these phony fools, begging them to grace their shows and panels, and simply withhold buying power by not purchasing/patronizing Hollywood’s crappy cultural products.
An observant manager at a social event commented recently about my husband and me: “You both use language very precisely.” The man was bright alright, but he was not necessarily flattering us, since my spouse (PhD, dubbed “guru” in his field) is constantly pelted with admonitions: Be vaguer when zeroing in on a problem—solve it to the group’s advantage, but don’t dare speak openly of incompetence. However obvious, credit the collective, submerge your achievements, ditch the “I” pronoun in favor of the “we.” (And how, pray tell, does one solve problems without removing the obstacles to their resolution? Easy: the able do double shifts to cover for the deadwood.)
The private sector is silhouetted by the state–and infected with the same collectivist philosophy, which aims to maintain the status quo, abolish the deference to ability (since we are all the same, given the right nurture, right? WRONG), and never admit that some are brighter than the rest. Or if this cannot be denied, rope the better man in the service of the mediocre majority that thrives in a culture of collectivism.
To be clear, this impetus is reflexive, rather than a matter of collusion and conspiracy. With few exceptions, most people believe they benefit from state- and corporate enforced collectivism—they believe this is the right way to be, the thing to strive for. (The Bell Curve—normal distribution—will give a hint as to why this is so.)
The co-optation of language plays a large role in subverting reality. The state and its lick-spittle toadies—educrats, mediacrats, and “intellectual”—have co-opted semantics over the years; stolen our words so that the new words better serve the parallel reality they’ve manufactured.
This is serious stuff since language mediates thoughts, actions, and hence public debate and policy.
The mutation in the accepted “meaning” of the word inflation serves as a good example of the process I’ve touched upon.
“Samuel Johnson’s famous A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, had just one definition for inflation,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s Justin Lahart, in “Inflation Definitions: Through the Ages”:
The state of being swelled with wind; flatulence.
Naturally, the WSJ does not anchor its historical survey of “the evolution of the dictionary definition of inflation from ‘flatulence’ to ‘rising prices'” in any philosophical framework; it certainly omits any reference to the natural laws of economics. Nevertheless, do read “Using a Dictionary to Define Inflation Can Spell Trouble”
You ought to conclude that the culture en masse is fleeing from truth.
UPDATED: Compassionate Fascist, sadly, proves my point: The official line, which he repeats, has it that inflation is a rise in prices. False! Inflation is an increase in the money supply. The general rise in prices is but a consequence of an increase in the money supply.
Navy SEALs are incredible specimens, both intellectually and physically. Every interview, over the past few days, with members of this elite unit, has demonstrated the superman qualities SEALs possess. They even look like cut-out images from an episode of “The Unit.” It’s a shame that these magnificent men must place their skills at the service of the state. I suspect, however, that if you are SEAL material, you don’t have many options.
American men have endured decades of emasculation—legal and cultural—in civilian life. Hobbies and work that require such a perfect amalgamation of mental and physical prowess, as being a SEAL demands, are hard to come by. Or are illegal. These men are … manly men; they are chivalrous and disciplined. These qualities are penalized in the feminized workplace culture that has been crafted by the feminists manning Human Resources (Y chromosome carriers included). Frankly, manly qualities are being bred-out of men.
(HR makes my contact behind enemy lines—the American corporation, which works a lot like the US State does—take “Diversity” tests and PC quizzes to keep him in-line.)
Punish a little boy time and again at school for “Bang-bang you’re dead,” of for playing “Cowboys and Indians,” and then teach him do so to his own tyke—and you get generations of girly-boys (down to the fussy sounding falsettos with which many heterosexual men now speak).
I even wondered in “Manly No More,” whether it was possible that “the feminization of society over the last 20 to 30 years is changing males, body and mind. Could the subliminal stress involved in sublimating one’s essential nature be producing less manly men?”
In any event, if one were so endowed, where could a man find private-sector work or hobbies that allowed him to put into practice the skills he would use as a SEAL? That is, without being arrested by the powers that be, or sent to de-Nazification camps/programs (Dr. Phil, anger management, etc).
Although Demi Moore kept getting in the way (and blocking views of Viggo Mortensen), I watched “G.I. Jane” many times over for the impossible training. Of course, not even Amazonian women should be considered for this kind of Special Operations team where, esprit de corps is everything. Fortunately, “G.I. Jane” was just fiction; women are precluded from the Navy SEALs.
UPDATE I (May 8): I think Robert G., below, has been reading and contributing to this (moderated) site long enough to know what a traditionalist means when she points to manhood. Mr. Glisson’s mentors are certainly of a piece with the manhood described. But there is more.
I was referring to something else SEALs seem to possess. We’re talking here about different expressions of manhood. However, the culture has prohibited open discussion of the things my post addresses, very specifically. These are a combination in some men (and certain women too) of qualities that make them scale mountains as the explorers of old did, take to the seas to discover new places, and slay dragons, to use a metaphor.
Have we forgotten the superman (one among a few hundred kids) who graduated with us, and who managed, with equal easy, higher math (in my days they divided us into groups according to ability), marathons, while charming everyone around him with his drive and decency? I remember the specimen! And I am not going to pretend he didn’t exist so as to make everyone feel better. I am quite able to live with the reality that I was not of that species; others prefer to deny that there is such a specimen.
Mr. Glisson seems to want me to say that such supermen end up as killers for the state. As a young girl who partook of the mixed-sex scouts in Israel, I remember so well our 16-year-old group leader. A mere boy, who, when we were lost in the scrubby mountain range of Israel’s tiny interior, in temperatures of 120 degrees, with one water container per child—how with absolute cool, this boy navigated back to base, using the primitive navigational instrument of the day—the compass—sans cellphones and 911 helis hovering above.
On his back he carried the kids who passed out for lack of water. He was already about 6 feet and 3 inches tall. I was but 12, but I recall looking at his face to see if I should be fearful. His young face reflected the enormous responsibility he had undertaken—and was given. But by looking at him, I also knew he’d get us back to base. I even recall his name: Avner.
Doesn’t any one remember that kind of kid? Serious, studious, focused—nothing he couldn’t do??? I doubt these types are allowed to flex their mental and physical muscle to the fullest these days—and certainly not in the repulsively politicized, feminized scouts. The Avners of today, if they persist in contributing to society to the fullest—in the scouts, for instance—would be programmed not to show superior skill (lest stupid, fat kids be made to feel bad); not to comfort sad kids, not to mentor kids like themselves, in case he risked transmitting and excess of machismo competency. Blah, blah.
UPDATE II: rch’s note: It’s succinct, apolitical, and to the point; as you would except from One of These Men. I’m proud to know him too. Enough said.
UPDATE III: Mr. Glisson and I always have a good dialogue; between us we get to the soul of the subject. Each SEAL is an individualist, capable of becoming a leader at the drop of a hat. It is sad that this kind of core character is under assault. This pushes men—whose biology and mentality craves the excitement and the challenge—to serve the state.
