Frank Brownlow’s post of a few days ago has made me want to continue the discussion it began, but the truth is, it ain’t simple. I’m at a disadvantage, because Dr. Brownlow’s is an eagle’s eye view of the paradox of culture under totalitarianism, whereas what I want to respond with is a worm’s eye view of the underlying evidentiary base
To Americans, who treat eating as either a shameful necessity–the worse food tastes, presumably, the more moral is the consumer–or as an opportunity for displaying a lifestyle choice, the sacred meal is a notion even more alien than the good meal. Americans eat worse than any wealthy nation in the history of the world.
In the 50s and 60s both sides, left and right offered some resistance to the triumph of what we can call, in contrast to the true, the good, and the beautiful, the untrue, the bad, and the ugly. Oddly enough, the liberal-left put up a surprisingly good fight, something hard to believe these days when NPR punctuates its news broadcasts with rap music.
There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Taxes are an infamously good way to discourage whatever they tax. For this reason and others, the income tax and the property tax are especially bad ideas, for they discourage both work and ownership, along with mandating that all forms of work and property produce a minimal amount of cash.
The tone of the whole piece, which uses “fascism” or “fascist” 14 times, is that of a young Red Guard during Mao’s Cultural Revolution 50 years ago, shutting down all voices it doesn’t agree with: “Last year, we stood with students who righteously shut down the Trump regime mouthpiece Milo Yiannopoulos at UC Berkeley, and we were part of preventing the parade of fascist monsters from storming the same campus in a so-called ‘Free Speech Week’ last September.
This is essentially a letter from Munich, where my wife and I flew last week – I to celebrate the composer Vladimir Genin’s sixtieth birthday, Olga to take part in a grosse Jubiläumskonzert in honor of the occasion. This took place on Sunday evening in Munich’s Gasteig, incongruously – for anyone familiar with Genin’s music – a modernist monstrosity along the lines of London’s Barbican and the new Seine Musicale in Paris.
It took a confluence of two lies, the capitalist lie and the Marxist lie, to produce the total mendacity we know that neither system achieved by itself.
Condemned to hope’s delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts, or slow decline,
Our social comforts drop away.
Once there was a little boy whose name was Robert Reese;
And every Friday afternoon he had to speak a piece.
So many poems thus he learned, that soon he had a store
Of recitations in his head and still kept learning more.
