Gary Childress wrote: ↑Fri Jan 24, 2025 1:40 pm
If you want to find causes of today's cultural malaise, I think if you look closely enough, you'll probably find that we shouldn't have gone to war over the 9/11 Crisis. That's been the elephant in the room for the past 20+ years.
You often initiate threads, bringing up issues that often provoke both inane bickering and interesting conversation. Generally speaking I personally feel you deserve an award for generally positive and productive contributions.
Here, you have brought up what could be a super-interesting topic: the roots and origin of general malaise. Obviously, as Americans, we tend to dominate such questions with our own America-focus, as the resident Kiwi
points out. I guess that cannot be helped.
I can say that I have spent about a decade, longer even, researching that question both directly and indirectly. What I will say is that I am of the opinion that though the topic “What are the causes of today's cultural malaise” is highly important, there is no one on this forum very capable, nor actually interested, in pursuing the topic. Or, if some opinion is offered it will be of a partisan type. I.e. defending some pet, personal theory.
What has produced and is producing the MAGA Movement is such a hot topic really that no one (that I am aware of) can really talk about it in a fair and open way. Why? To be honest about it requires taking seriously some views and notions that must necessarily be condemned as
wrongthink right out of the gate.
I can cite a few examples. Here is one (I have posted it before) by Wilmot Robertson, an ur-MAGA patriot and populist, but condemned absolutely today. He wrote in the early 70s. See for yourself:
Is it not incredible that the largest American population group, the group with the deepest roots, the most orderly and most technically proficient group, the nuclear population group of American culture and of the American gene pool, should have lost its preeminence to weaker, less established, less numerous, culturally heterogeneous, and often mutually hostile minorities?
With all due allowance for minority dynamism ... this miraculous shift of power could never have taken place without a Majority "split in the ranks" - without the active assistance and participation of Majority members themselves. It has already been pointed out that race consciousness is one of mankind's greatest binding forces. From this it follows that when the racial gravitational pull slackens people tend to spin off from the group nucleus. Some drift aimlessly through life as human isolates. Others look for a substitute nucleus in an intensified religious or political life, or in an expanded class consciousness. Still others, out of idealism, romanticism, inertia, or perversity, attach themselves to another race in an attempt to find the solidarity they miss in their own.
(Do you need
exegesis of what Robertson is saying here? And can you connect his complaint to what is now occurring today as Trump and his political power-base are gaining power? Can you see it and talk about it without condemnation of the stance?)
And speaking of 9/11 I can assure you (I have followed the controversial theories as to who did it, how, and why (in their view) the ENTIRE conventional view is false through-and-through) that if the entire topic were allowed to be investigated and discussed without repression, that it would explode faith in our own government, which hangs by a thread in any case.
So —
malaise. Such an interesting topic. You are soaked, constantly, in
malaise but (here is my opinion) you do not have any sense of what an interpretive model and method should be. But “you” are actually a multitude today. You just happen to be over-sensitive, like the canary in the coal mine.
Who
interprets correctly here? Promethean? Immanuel Can? The very dangerous panted one? Wilbur Boneman? Phyllo? Alexiev? You?
Interpretation is really a topic unto itself. It’s what we see, what we are allowed to see, what we both select and deselect.
points out. I guess that cannot be helped.