Category Archives: The Zeitgeist

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.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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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.

The Managerial State’s Media and Medical Lapdogs

GUNS, Individual Rights, Propaganda, Pseudo-intellectualism, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Regulation, The Zeitgeist

I had feared that the reaction to this week’s column on the pornography of public grief, now on LewRockwell.com, would be as angry as the reaction to my “Bullied ‘Jail Bus’ Lady: Fearful Fatty, Not A Hero.” Was I in for a happy surprise!

The letters have been overwhelmingly full of gratitude and relief for my having expressed what readers were thinking.

Here is a smattering:

Sent: Friday, December 21, 2012 10:42 AM
To: imercer@wnd.com
Subject: RE: The pornography of public grief

You are a Modern Prophet. You have identified the real affliction that humanity is either willingly blind to, or naively blinkered.

Regards,
JT

Friday, December 21, 2012 1:42 PM
To: ‘imercer@wnd.com’
Subject: Public Grief!

All I can say about your article on public grief is…”AMEN”. … Thanks for your articles. I have always appreciated them, I should have said so before this.

JB, Texas

Friday, December 21, 2012 4:28 PM
To: imercer@wnd.com
Subject: The pornography of public grief

Very good piece.

Interested in you book “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

Having lived in SA for five months.

John

Friday, December 21, 2012 4:38 PM
To: imercer@wnd.com
Subject: EXCELLENT!!! (THE PORNOGRAPHY OF PUBLIC GRIEF
)

Hello Ilana,
It has been several years since we exchanged emails, and it has been some time since I’ve caught back up with your intellectually masterful musings.

Your piece said what I, and I think many others, have been thinking since the awful news broke last week. And nobody has said it better than you with this:
“At the root of it all is the rejection of the existence of unadulterated evil. Rather than accept the reality of evil – s–t happens, live with it and be prepared to proceed against it – misconduct has been medicalized.”

Thank you so very much for your strength to stay true to your moral and intellectual compass.

Wishing you peace and prosperity,

CB, OH

Friday, December 21, 2012 10:00 PM
To: ilana@ilanamercer.com
Subject: Thank you

Your article brought clarity to me of the feeling I have had about the circus and exploitation of the grieving process of the families and friends of the victims. The national media avoids the issues, use any excuse not to make news and create entertainment ghoulish at the least.
Sincerely,
HS

*************

Needless to say, the media as master of ceremonies is sustaining the puke factor. And the ostensible defenders of our sacred right to defend our lives are looking like clobbered seals on ice floes.

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.

Jack Kerwick Against ‘Conservatives’ For Gargantuan Government

Conservatism, Democrats, Republicans, The Zeitgeist

“Major media feeds on mediocrity,” I wrote in “Just Another Mouth in the Republican Fellatio Machine.” Wanna get a gig in Sodom and Gomorrah? Having boobs and no brains (like Margaret Hoover, Gretchen Carlson, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Krystal Ball, Noelle Nikpour, Dana Perino, and S. E. Cupp) goes a long way.

Otherwise, you will have to learn to parrot one of the party-lines.

Jack Kerwick, of The New American, refuses to play the game:

Throughout the first six years of his presidency, George W. Bush’s Republican Party held strong majorities in both chambers of Congress. Thanks to his policies, and his disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan particularly, the Democrats not only defeated the Republicans in 2006 and 2008, the former actually gained super majorities in the House and the Senate. Bush retired from his second term with a 30-percent approval rating.
Yet no sooner was Bush II on the road back to Crawford, Texas than “the Architect” of the GOP’s defeat — Karl Rove — as well as other Bush lackeys, such as Dana Perino, were signing their contracts to become regulars on Fox News. It is there that such stalwart “conservatives” as Sean Hannity, who daily beats the drums about the Democrats’ exorbitant spending, routinely consults Rove and Perino, accomplices to Bush’s exorbitant spending, for counsel on how to frustrate the Democrats’ exorbitant spending.
It is on Fox that the likes of Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer continue to be treated as bottomless fonts of wisdom in spite of their spectacularly checkered track records on all manner of topics. From the Middle Eastern wars within which we remain mired to the presidential nominations of McCain and Mitt Romney to amnesty for the millions of Third World immigrants who are transforming the character of America, Kristol and Krauthammer have been almost shockingly wrong.
There are numerous other instances that could be cited to show that “the conservative movement” has, by and large, been taken over by fame-seekers of one sort or other. The most recent of which I’m aware is that of World Net Daily.
WorldNetDaily is a popular “conservative” website whose editor, Joseph Farrah, has rightly ripped into Karl Rove for the faux conservative that he is. Yet Farrah just hired former Pennsylvania senator and GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum as a regular contributor to WND.
Now, Santorum is about as conservative as Rove. Indeed, if there is any significant difference between the one and the other, or between Santorum and our last president, whose “brain” we are forever told was none other than Mr. Rove himself, I have yet to discover what it could be.
Santorum not only supports “socialized medicine” — i.e., Medicare and Medicaid — but in voting for Medicare Part D, a prescription drug benefit that marked the largest expansion in Medicare since its inception, Santorum actually strengthened socialized medicine while paving the way for ObamaCare.
This former Pennsylvania senator, who enjoys the distinction of having lost his bid for reelection by a larger margin than any senator in the Keystone state’s history, advocates not just “big,” but Gargantuan Government. That Santorum actually wants to increase our troop presence in countries around the world (the 160 or so countries where we currently have troops stationed isn’t sufficient I guess) shows that his foreign policy vision is even more ambitious than that of Bush’s.

Excerpted from “Fame, Fortune, and “the Conservative Movement.”

The only thing about Santorum that is more repulsive than his politics is his constant schmaltzy milking of his daughter’s condition. A cultural conservative, first and foremost, separates his private from his public life and keeps his emotions in check. (Like Romney did. Mitt Romney relented and spoke about his trials, tribulations and good works only when public pressure mounted for him to weep and wobble like a woman.)