But here is a Jeremiad for us, so see what you think. More and more as culture is failing to be cultivated by civilization and instead is growing more weeds the decline of civlization cannot be denied. The American Republic is slowly going the way of the Weimar. The process speeds up at the end and then the bubble must burst, as that is what bubbles do. If the people have the moral fiber to deal with it then a decadent civilization may rise higher than one might think. But it is different when there is only a gluttonous, wicked and adulterous generation left when the bubble bursts. Money can paper over the consequences of a multitude of evils, so put more copper in the coin as the Roman Republic did, more! It is interesting that such decline can be and is predicted from the very top well in advance, from the ideas of the thinkers. These are the nice people, pretty much all of them are nice, who work with beautiful ideas that kill when words become bullets. As there is no money to paper things over.
A Jeremiad for we, the MTVeee generation:
"Nietzsche, particularly, sought to tap again the irrational sources of vitality, to replenish our dried-up stream from barbaric sources, and thus encouraged the Dionysian and the music derivative from it.(The Closing of the American Mind, By Alan Bloom :73-74)
This is the significance of rock music. I do not suggest that it has any high intellectual sources. But it has risen to its current heights in the education of the young on the ashes of classical music, and in an atmosphere in which there is no intellectual resistance to attempts to tap the rawest passions. Modern-day rationalists, such as economists, are indifferent to it and what it represents. The irrationalists are all for it. There is no need to fear that “the blond beasts” are going to come forth from the bland souls of our adolescents. But rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire—not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored. It acknowledges the first emanations of children’s emerging sensuality and addresses them seriously, eliciting them and legitimating them, not as little sprouts that must be carefully tended in order to grow into gorgeous flowers, but as the real thing. Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.
Young people know that rock has the beat of sexual intercourse. ....In alliance with some real art and a lot of pseudo-art, an enormous industry cultivates the taste for the orgiastic state of feeling connected with sex, providing a constant flood of fresh material for voracious appetites. Never was there an art form directed so exclusively to children.
Ministering to and according with the arousing and cathartic music, the lyrics celebrate puppy love as well as polymorphous attractions, and fortify them against traditional ridicule and shame. The words implicitly and explicitly describe bodily acts that satisfy sexual desire and treat them as its only natural and routine culmination for children who do not yet have the slightest imagination of love, marriage or family. This has a much more powerful effect than does pornography on youngsters, who have no need to watch others do grossly what they can so easily do themselves. Voyeurism is for old perverts; active sexual relations are for the young. All they need is encouragement.
The inevitable corollary of such sexual interest is rebellion against the parental authority that represses it. Selfishness thus becomes indignation and then transforms itself into morality. The sexual revolution must overthrow all the forces of domination, the enemies of nature and happi ness. From love comes hate, masquerading as social reform. A worldview is balanced on the sexual fulcrum. What were once unconscious or half-conscious childish resentments become the new Scripture. And then comes the longing for the classless, prejudice-free, conflictiess, universal society that necessarily results from liberated consciousness "We Are the World," a pubescent version of Alle Menscizen werden Brüder, the fulfillment of which has been inhibited by the political equivalents of Mom and Dad. These are the three great lyrical themes: sex, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love. Such polluted sources issue in a muddy stream where only monsters can swim. A glance at the videos that project images on the wall of Plato’s cave since MTV took it over suffices to prove this. Hitler’s image recurs frequently enough in exciting contexts to give one pause. Nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful or even decent can find a place in such tableaux. There is room only for the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art, combined with a pervasiveness, importance and content beyond Tocqueville’s wildest imagination."
"We Are the World." Wasn't that Michael Jackson's sort of anthem?
I have some different thoughts on rock music than the attack layed out above. And come to think of it, I may write about it later. But for now here is some news from the Continent, as they have rather thoroughly refused the lessons of the Weimar Republic and civilizations throughout history. Those who judge judgment, quite simply refuse to repent. How they judge, lest they be judged!
(Sunday Mirror
May 1, 2005, Sunday
SECTION: 3 Star Edition; NEWS; Pg. 21
HEADLINE: I'M A DAISY-CHAINER: WE DID IT
IN A RUSH WITHOUT A CONDOM.. THEN GIRLS SWAPPED AROUND;
BOY, 15, REVEALS TRUTH OF TEEN SEX CRAZE
BYLINE: EXCLUSIVE BY DENNIS ELLAM)
"IT started in the porn industry. That most innocent of images - daisy-chaining - became warped to mean an orgy with lots of partners pleasuring each other at the same time.And the parents are shocked, just shocked! What did they expect with their Millian, "You can do whatever you can get away with doing without causing harm." sort of standards?
But its meaning has changed again - and this time around it will horrify every parent in the country.
Daisy-chaining now describes sleazy, drink-fuelled orgies in which TEENAGERS indulge in group sex.
The craze has shocked experts already concerned about the rising levels of sexual disease among youngsters.
Last week nurses raised the worrying trend at the Royal College of Nursing's annual conference in Harrogate, North Yorkshire.
The same conference also heard how a British boy aged only 14 had contracted HIV through sexual intercourse.
....
"I only started out of curiosity, because I thought everybody else was having sex except me as I was still a virgin at the time," he said. ...."
(The Express
May 2, 2005
SECTION: U.K. 1st Edition; LEADER; Pg. 12
HEADLINE: IN A SOCIETY OBSESSED WITH SEX,
NO WONDER TEENAGERS HAVE ORGIES; LEADER - THE MONDAY COLUMN
BYLINE: By Virginia Blackburn)
"ARE THERE no taboos left? For even in a world in which nothing seems to raise eyebrows any more, this was a shocking revelation. Last week, at the Royal College of Nursing's conference in Harrogate, school nurses warned that increasing numbers of teenagers are taking part in an activity known as "daisy chaining" - group sex.
....
If one were to ask for a snapshot of what is wrong with our society today, it would be impossible to better that. For, even allowing for some exaggeration, it is clear we are seeing an increase in sexual activity among the young as never before: in February, figures released by the Department of Health revealed that in 2003, 1,171 girls aged 14 and under had abortions.
That is a rise of eight percent in 12 months, showing the Government pledge to halve pregnancy rates among the under-18s by 2010 to be risible. Over the past seven years, the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy has used £138 million of taxpayers' money to try to reduce the rates of teen pregnancy by, among other measures, making the morningafter pill, condoms and sex "education" (for which read "advice") more readily available.
Had that strategy paid any dividends at all, it would have been worth every penny: as it is, not only has it done nothing to bring down teen pregnancies but it has encouraged some forms of sexual activity in which most adults would not dream of taking part.
Group sex? Among children? Thirty years ago, this would have been so unlikely as to be treated as a joke in extremely poor taste.
But this crisis in our midst must be laid at many more doors than the Government's: it is a by-product of the world we live in today.
To return to that comparison with swinging: a few years ago, swinging and sex parties were virtually unheard of. Now they are everywhere, with participants not only admitting to their dubious adventures but speaking of having sex with anonymous partners as a "lifestyle choice" on a par with taking up golf. Is it any wonder children hear about these exploits and decide that they want to try this exciting new activity, too?
Everywhere, youngsters are bombarded with the message that in order to be cool, it is imperative to have sex. Teen magazines are some of the worst offenders: while piously proclaiming that everyone should have the right to say "no", they are still sending out the message that sex is the be-all and end-all of life. The current issue of Bliss magazine, for example, tells the story of one girl's "sordid sex secret" - aged 16, she was videoed having sex with a group of soldiers - as well as providing an A-Z of sex that includes, among much else, the term "yo yo knickers". This, explains Bliss, is an unkind term for a girl who sleeps around: to combat this, it recommends readers to find a boyfriend they can trust.
.....
Of course, teenage magazines are far from being the only offenders: sexual imagery aimed at children is rife. Three years ago Argos was criticised for launching a range of underwear for girls as young as nine, which included G-strings and padded bras. Just last month Asda was forced to remove pink and black lace underwear sets for nine-year-olds.
French Connection has for years used a slogan that is too vulgar to merit repetition here and sold T-shirts bearing that slogan to young children.
It's not just clothes. Even the humble Pot Noodle, possibly the least erotic foodstuff on the planet, has had its image sexed up to appeal to the youth vote, with the tagline "hurt me, you slag" in one ad. After complaints, the advertisement was withdrawn.
Sexual imagery now filters down to the people who are most vulnerable and least equipped to deal with it in society. It is a shocking betrayal of our children to encourage sexual activity so young: quite apart from the emotional havoc it wreaks among both sexes, the physical damage can last a lifetime.
Sexually transmitted diseases are rocketing among the young: between 1999 to 2002, incidents of gonorrhoea tripled in boys aged 13 to 19, while chlamydia, which can cause infertility in women, quadrupled.
As far as girls are concerned, quite apart from the danger of STDs, it has been known for years that the younger a girl is when she starts having sex, and the greater the number of her partners, both increase her risk of developing cervical cancer.
Yet still we dole out condoms and morningafter pills and fail to press home the message that sex at a very young age will do our children long-term harm.
Indeed, to suggest that children should be given some moral guidance as to when they first have sex and with whom is, in some quarters, enough to invite accusations of prudery and a wish to return to the reigning morality of the Fifties. It is nothing of the sort. There is nothing prim about saying that children should not have sex, and nor should they be encouraged to do so, subliminally or otherwise.
...."
There are not enough people to write good Jeremiads. And I don't know if you noticed but most American preachers are pansies. They have tamed tongues, lame tongues. How nice!
Unfortunately the inversions typical to moral degeneracy echo out in many ways, even to the development of the totalitarian State. The State is not checked by a weakened Church, a weak Conscience to the Body politic, as the same thing happens on an individual level. "Control communicates care and devotion to children, condescension and disdain to adults. Herein lies a fundamental dilemma of society: It ought to encourage parents to love and control their children, and politicians to respect their fellow citizens and leave them alone.
Modern societies are well on their way to inverting this arrangement: They encourage parents to fake respect for their children and thus justify their failure to control them; and politicians to fake love for their fellow citizens and thus justify their efforts to exercise capricious control over them."
(The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary
by Thomas Szasz (emphasis mine) :1-2)
On a similar MTVeee generation note...apparently Britney Spears has her own T.V. show now. Yay! She challenges people in her ad, "Can you handle my truth?" Yes, Britney, I think it just might be possible to handle, maybe. But perhaps she cannot handle the truth about her truth, no more than the brazen laugh of a prostitute hides the fact that sometimes she cries herself to sleep in the dark. She uses her body to sell her soul.
It seems to be the sort of direction that the MTVeee generation may be going. Only those who have the eyes to see, to get above the "cult"ure and look down on it, shall see if it does. And then perhaps someone can write some Jeremiads about it.
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