Category Archives: Pop-Culture

UPDATED: Meanness Shines Through The Shock

America, Etiquette, Family, Media, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

This is one of those things one gets into trouble for noticing and pointing out. So I’ll go ahead and point it out, ’cause—boy!—did I notice it.

Gene Rosen, “a 69-year-old retired psychologist… took … four girls and two boys” from the Sandy Hook Elementary school into his home near the school, shortly after the shooting.

Rosen said he had heard the staccato sound of gunfire about 15 minutes earlier but dismissed it as an obnoxious hunter in the nearby woods.
“I had no idea what had happened,” Rosen said. “I couldn’t take that in.”
He walked the children past his small goldfish pond with its running waterfall, and the garden he made with his two grandchildren, into the small yellow house he shares with his wife.
He ran upstairs and grabbed an armful of stuffed animals. He gave those to the children, along with some fruit juice, and sat with them as the two boys described seeing their teacher being shot.

But this good Samaritan’s offering did not quite meet the standards of one of his small guests. The boy responded with a comment Rosen thought so adorable, he “wanted to tell him, `I love you. I love you.'”

“This little boy turns around, and composes himself, and he looks at me like he had just removed himself from the carnage and he says, `Just saying, your house is very small.'”

Is that not a rude and unkind quip?

Just saying.

UPDATE (1/11): Everyone on Facebook ducked the issue of how badly behaved kids have become. Myron Pauli at least responded by changing the subject. But pretending the problem doesn’t exist is becoming harder. Fox and experts are catching up with a topic I’ve been covering since the early 2000s and before. “We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists.”

UPDATED: No Country For Old, White Men

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Critique, Democrats, Elections, Feminism, Media, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Pop-Culture, Republicans, The West, The Zeitgeist, War, Welfare

“No Country For Old, White Men” is the current column, now on WND. Here’s an excerpt:

“…Romney was booed when he wooed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Enough to provoke the ire of blacks, Latinos, ladies of all hues, the halt and the lame was the mere hint that the too-white-to-like Romney would slow down the gravy train. Lickspittle Republicans were as eager as the Democratic representatives of these identity groups to lambaste Mr. Romney for being too attractive, too macho, too white, too Christian, and too rich.

No one could have failed to notice that Mitt Romney resembles the “Mad Man” played by Jon Hamm, in the eponymous AMC series. Both men are tall, dark and handsome, with the kind of picture-perfect, quintessential American good looks. Both hide their feelings and are spare with their emotions. When they show their softer side–it actually means something. Each is dutiful and dependable.

Such qualities, once considered desirable in a man, now offend the dominatrixes who run the nation’s newsrooms.

“He’s a very private man; and that’s a liability.” “How can you get me to vote for him, if I don’t like him?” “He needs to humanize himself.” And, “Can he [even] be humanized?” demanded one CNN ghoul by the name of Gloria Borger on the eve of Halloween. Mitt Romney was inhuman: That, very plainly, was the premise of this harridan’s rhetorical question.

“Ann Romney’s job, and she’s been pushing for this in the campaign, is to kind of humanize him,” noodled the banal Ms. Borger over and over again, for the campaign’s duration.

This was the menstrually inspired miasma that emanated from TV studios countrywide.

Thus did Mitt Romney come to embody elements in Aristotle’s definition of a tragic figure: …”

The complete column is “No Country For Old, White Men,” now on WND.

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UPDATE: VIA JACK KERWICK:

You are absolutely correct for noting the unmistakable racial subtext of this election and people’s reaction to Romney. … MR and his wife are straight out of 1950’s America, the Dark Ages when blacks, women, and homosexuals were oppressed, the days before the Enlightened ’60’s. Romney is ‘Father Knows Best,’ Ward Cleaver. Obama, in contrast, is the symbol of the new, multicultural America.

UPDATED: The Pornography Of Grief (Barf, Barf)

Crime, Education, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Journalism, Media, Pop-Culture, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The Zeitgeist

Almost as warped as the (evil, not ill) mass murderer who killed 20 children and 7 adults (his mother included) at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., is the freaky spectacle of mass contagion—where members of the public turn professional mourners, flocking to funeral happenings for victims they never knew.

Yes, each one of us can project his own baggage onto the senseless deaths in Newtown. But grief is not a tribal affair. Communities don’t grieve; individuals who incur loss do. These ritualistic displays among regular folks across the US are symptomatic of our festering cultural commons.

At the center of this festering culture is the journalist, acting as a master of ceremonies (MC). (I can see Anderson Cooper reconfiguring his Hero of the Year Award as we speak. This low-watt, dim bulb of a journo chooses America’s heroes each year, based on how many tears they shed. Pretty much.) For the media’s blow-by-blow, wall-to-wall coverage of the memorial in Newtown, Connecticut—and of every connected utterance on the issue, official or other—is a deconstruction of the discipline of journalism.

“Intellectual disciplines,” historian Keith Windschuttle has written, “were founded in ancient Greece and gained considerable impetus from the work of Aristotle who identified and organized a range of subjects into orderly bodies of learning. … The history of Western knowledge shows the decisive importance of the structuring of disciplines. This structuring allowed the West to benefit from two key innovations: the systematization of research methods, which produced an accretion of consistent findings; and the organization of effective teaching, which permitted a large and accumulating body of knowledge to be transmitted from one generation to the next.” (The Killing of History, Keith Windschuttle, Encounter, pp. 247-250)

The signal achievement of the postmodern tradition has been to completely dismantle one of the greatest achievements of Western Civilization: the intellectual discipline.

If there is nothing new to report on the case, no reporting needs to take place.

The victims of this shooting have become a sideshow in the pornography of grief.

UPDATE: BARF, BARF. A headline on Huffington Post (CNN’s Alpha Female, Anderson Cooper, Did a Similar Segment on The Topic): “Comfort Dogs Sent To Newtown From Chicago Area To Help Community After Sandy Hook Shooting.”

One day after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a group of golden retrievers from the Chicago area made a cross-country journey to comfort the affected community in Newtown.

Apparently there are no companion dogs in Newtown, Conn. They had to import expert dogs to handle the situation.

There is very little dignity in this.

You can’t make this stuff up.

UPDATED: Mitt Romney: Elements Of A Tragic Figure

History, Literature, Morality, Nationhood, Politics, Pop-Culture, Republicans

Mitt Romney embodies some, not all, the elements in Aristotle’s definition of a tragic figure:

* Character must be a person of stature. (Check)
* Character must neither be totally good or totally evil
* An error of judge or a weakness in character causes the misfortune. (Check)
* The character must be responsible for tragic events.
* Action involves a change in fortune from happiness to misery. (Check)
* Subject is serious. (Check)
* Tragic hero is of noble birth and displays a nobility of spirit. (Check)
* Protagonists pitted against forces beyond their control. (Check)
* Struggles courageously until his fall. (Check)
* Though defeated, gains a measure of increased wisdom.

Mr. Romney’s election concession speech speaks to these tragic elements, especially this man’s abiding faith in “this great nation.”

I so wish — I so wish that I had been able to fulfill your hopes to lead the country in a different direction, but the nation chose another leader. And so Ann and I join with you to earnestly pray for him and for this great nation.

UPDATE (11/7): We “left everything on the field,” Romney said, adding “we have given our all to this campaign.”

This comports with the prototypical Greek tragic figure who “struggles courageously until his fall.” Meantime, the snake in the grass coiled and hissed and spat venom, all the way to a victory.