GABlog

Michael Novak writes:

In the current culture wars on campus, an explicit indictment of these perversions may be useful.

(1) Anti-Americanism. Since it regards the West (at least its white males) as imperialistic, and America as the most advanced face of the West, multiculturalism expresses hostility to American traditions and institutions, while glorifying non-Western cultures, especially those inimical to America.

(2) Victimology. Multiculturalism tends to divide the world into a privileged set of victims and their alleged oppressors, through the lens of a loose and vulgar Marxism. This Marxism is cultural rather than economic.

(3) Ego-boosting. The aim of multiculturalism is to boost “self-esteem

Spengler has some amusing reflections on pop music and the stupidity that attends the culture of resentment:

No other nation rejects the notion of a high culture with such vehemence, or celebrates the mediocre with such giddiness. Americans prefer to identify with what is like them, rather than emulate what is better than them. The epitome of its popular culture is a national contest to choose from among random entrants a new singing star, the “American Idol”.

Three or four generations ago, US popular culture shared a porous boundary with classical culture. The most successful musical comedy of the 1920s, Jerome Kern’s Showboat, contained classical elements requiring operatic voices. George Gershwin, the 1930s’ most popular tunesmith, prided himself on an opera, Porgy and Bess. Benny Goodman, the decade’s top jazz musician, recorded Mozart. The most successful singer of the 1930s, Bing Crosby, had a voice of classical quality. Never mind that what he sang was insipid; his listeners knew very well that they could not sing like Bing Crosby.

Americans of earlier generations, in short, listened to music that they admired but could not hope to imitate, because they looked up to a higher plane of culture and technique. Today Americans favor performers with whom they can identify precisely because they have no more technique or culture than the average drunk bellowing into a karaoke machine.

-CSM

Nelson Ascher says unanimity isn’t required:

We all have spent too much time talking about the widespread anti-Semitism in the Muslim world and discovering, to our surprise, that many in the West actually share this feeling, while many more couldn’t really care less. This is a mistaken approach.

Instead of trying to understand “why they hate us

The latest Chronicle of Love & Resentment, entitled “The Final Conflict,” is now available.

-eric gans

This textbook example of scapegoating deserves to be front page news:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=22107

That it is not speaks volumes about the sick, contagious way in which all too many people think, speak, and act.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=22107_A_Death_Cult_Party_in_Jenin&only

I think he passes a little too quickly over some of our present difficulties, but here is a powerful, unconflicted defense of the Bush Doctrine from the godfather of the neo-conservative movement.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/files/podhoretz_0906.htm

Scenic Politics

As a vacation from the Middle East, this sample of Europe’s historical self-hatred is taken from an interview conducted by the leftish French weekly Le nouvel observateur with novelist and world traveler J.M.G. Le Clézio. See if you can detect what is missing in this picture (hint: obsidian knife):

N.O. – At the time of the conquest of Mexico, in what areas were the Amerindian civilizations ahead of Europe?

JL – Except for the practice of total war (firearms, cavalry, but above all the practice of terror: burned villages, women and children sold into slavery or massacred, the use of bacteriological weapons), the Amerindian civilizations were ahead of Europe in just about all areas: hydraulic agriculture, exact sciences, astronomy, medicine, zoology, anatomy. It is difficult to evaluate the domain of Aztec and Inca philosophy, but the first Spanish chroniclers, who arrived when almost everything had been destroyed, speak with admiration of the moral discourses, literary contests, and metaphysical discussions that enlivened these societies, of which the testimony of the few survivors (the final battle of Mexico-Tenochtitlan left 260,000 dead, most of whom belonged to the city’s elite) gives only an approximate idea.
Le nouvel observateur July 13, 2006 p. 51

-eric gans

Because university students are recruited for terror plots, it’s worth noticing that homegrown terrorists are nourished by some of the West’s dumbest ideas:

We wonder why Muslims in Europe won’t contain their grievances and settle down to live within the ordinary routines of European society. I imagine that the tacit motto of most British politicians is “Just give assimilation a chance.

Steyn opines:

Pan-Islamism is the profound challenge to conventional ideas of citizenship and nationhood. Of course, if you say that at the average Ivy League college, you’ll get a big shrug: Modern multicultural man disdains to be bound by the nation state, too; he prides himself on being un citoyen du monde. The difference is that, for Western do-gooders, it’s mostly a pose: They may occasionally swing by some Third World basket-case and condescend to the natives, but for the most part the multiculti set have no wish to live anywhere but an advanced Western democracy. It’s a quintessential piece of leftie humbug. They may think globally, but they don’t act on it.

The pan-Islamists do act. When they hold hands and sing “We Are The World,” they mean it. And we’re being very complacent if we think they only take over the husks of “failed states” like Afghanistan, Somalia and Lebanon. The Islamists are very good at using the principal features of the modern multicultural democracy — legalisms, victimology — to their own advantage. The United Kingdom is, relatively speaking, a non-failed state, but at a certain level Her Majesty’s government shares the same problem as their opposite numbers in Beirut: They don’t quite dare to move against the pan-Islamists and they have no idea what possible strategy would enable them to do so.

So instead they tackle the symptoms. Excellent investigative work by MI-5 and Scotland Yard foiled this plot, and may foil the next one, and the one after that, and the 10 after that, and the 100 after those. And in the meantime, a thousand incremental inconveniences fall upon the citizen. If you had told an Englishman on Sept. 10, 2001, that within five years all hand luggage would be banned on flights from Britain, he’d have thought you were a kook. If you’d told an Englishwoman that all liquids would be banned except milk for newborn babies that could only be taken on board if the adult accompanying the child drinks from the bottle in front of a security guard, she’d have scoffed and said no one would ever put up with such a ludicrous imposition. But now it’s here. What other changes will the Islamists have wrought in another five years?

Absent a determination to throttle the ideology, we’re about to witness the unraveling of the world.