More Almost Forbidden Thoughts
Almost everything that George W. Bush says is either an insincere calculated tactic or a sincere fantasy.
Our Congresspersons operate from a mind-set that is expedient, short-term, and self-interested. The general good and a long-range perspective seldom trouble their minds.
In American public discourse and historical accounts, the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960s is treated as a supreme, unquestionable triumph. No hint of even the smallest possible downside is permitted.
The Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s was thought of as applying only to the South, and, as far as possible, was designed to that end. If the public had realized it would soon be applied to others besides Southerners, it would not have passed.
Aside from a few fragmentary remnants, America has nothing that can be called a high culture and nothing that can be called a folk culture. It has a material culture—which has lost its creative and productive edge, and a pop culture—which is steadily sinking to the lowest common denominator.
War always involves to some extent exploitation of the young by the old and exploitation of the poor and humble by the rich and well-placed. However, in all places ansd times, the rich and well-placed have been obliged to share some of the risk and sacrifice. Except 21st century America.
"If only Longstreet had . . . " —O. Henry (William Sidney Porter)
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"nothing that can be called a folk culture"
As an outsider I have to say I think America, or at least the South, does have a folk culture; of which both Johny Cash's music and 'King of the Hill' cartoons are authentic expressions. Indeed the vibrancy of Country Music (leaving aside the pop) is a source of much envy.
"King of the Hill" is a abomination straight from the mind of a Ecuadoran who was raised in New Mexico -- it's not Southern, and it reinforces everything *wrong* about American (and Southern) culture.
The disabled war veteran (Cotton Hill) is a foul mouthed, abusive man who hates his son and spends his time knocking up a woman a third of his age. He also has another (illegitimate) son living in Japan.
Hank Hill is a weak-minded baby-boomer whose only passions in life are selling propane for his lecherous boss and voting Republican. Hank's wife Peggy and his niece Luanne are similarly dim-witted, frequently falling prey to con artists and must be repeatedly rescued.
Hank's son Bobby is an overweight, pale, slothful idiot who loves playing video games, listening to rap music, and wishes to be a stand-up comedian. His only friends are a half-Indian boy and a Laotian immigrant.
Hank's only friends are a fat, ugly Army barber, a paranoid-conspiracist pest control man (who doesn't realize his wife is repeatedly unfaithful to him,) and a single playboy with an incomprehensible accent. All they do is stand around the yard drinking beer, watching football, and competing on who has the best lawn.
Would this be an authentic expression of Southern folk culture?
"However, in all places and times, the rich and well-placed have been obliged to share some of the risk and sacrifice. Except 21st century America."
If there is any doubt as to the truth of this assertion and its consequences, I recommend The New York Times #1 best seller,
Fiasco. Not because it is good, well written, or even OK; but because it uses long direct quotations from the voice of real american soldiers who carry bullet wounds from Vietnam, right along side the idiotic quotes from idealogues who have never been in a fight with anyone except their girlfriend. These effetes from the Vulcan set are exposed not by some racist or unpatriotic conservative, but by their very own words and demeanor in the face of fire towards those who tried to prevent them from hurting themselves and others. Reading it will make any paleocon thank God that whatever he or she may be, that at least they tried to prevent the disaster. rr
Mr. Wilson, why do you insist on depressing me?
Dr.Wilson,
“If only Longstreet had . . . ” —O. Henry (William Sidney Porter)"
Why didn't Longstreet role up the left flank of "those people" at Gettysburg when he had the chance ? Was he reluctant because he wanted a defensive battle , because his whole division had not yet arrived or was he sulking because he disagreed with General Lee's strategy at the time ?
Dr. Wilson,
"Aside from a few fragmentary remnants, America has nothing that can be called a high culture and nothing that can be called a folk culture. It has a material culture—which has lost its creative and productive edge, and a pop culture—which is steadily sinking to the lowest common denominator."
Today, my ninety-year-old mother and I were motoring through the hill country of north Louisiana, that part of Louisiana which is home to her and which gives her a sense of place. Just outside Fryeburg, Louisiana, is a cemetery, a graveyard, in which my great-great-grandparents are buried, by great-grandparents are buried and my grandmother is buried, along with a host of aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. There, we have a "graveyard workin' " twice a year, once in October and once in May. As we passed through the countryside, despite her dimming eyes, my mother was quick to pick out an old house place, betrayed by some cedars, a wizened pear tree, or some roses now growing wild. In many cases, she remembered who lived there and would begin to describe the old house that still clung to her memory although its last material vestiges are no more to be seen. Suddenly, Mama said, "You know, I am who I am because of the people who once hoped, dreamed and struggled here." She then added, "Young people today merely live here. Who they are is determined by people far away in New York and Hollywood. They live here, but they are not from here." She went on to say that young people whom she encountered spoke differently, nasal, high-pitched and alien.
Mama is indeed correct. Culture is no longer produced locally; even here in the Deep South, it is but a warped image of illusions created far away on Madison Avenue, in the studios and in some unseen "ministry of propaganda."
We once had a culture, and here it lies.
http://www.rootsweb.com/~cemetery/louisiana/cemetery/maddencemetery.htm
Dr. Wilson,
"The Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s was thought of as applying only to the South, and, as far as possible, was designed to that end. If the public had realized it would soon be applied to others besides Southerners, it would not have passed."
I have more than once pointed out that the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960's was by any objective standard a breach of the Constitution, for it singled out specific principals, namely the Southern states, for applications of law that were not pressed upon the remaining states, the judicial renderings of the nine divines thereunto not withstanding.
Perhaps the stealth and cunning by which these "unlaws" have been "applied" to other states over time, could be sublime means of rectifying the the aforementioned breach. That would, however, be supposing some undercurrent of "good faith," of which there is absolutely no evidence.
Mr. Reavis,
We Louisianans still remember what Longstreet did to us as the Republican commander of the New Orleans Metropolitan Police. Among those facing Longstreet and his carpetbagger-loyal Metropolitan Police and among those driving Longstreet of the streets of New Orleans were veterans of the Washington Artillery who had also fought with Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia.
General Longstreet still and yet needs some historical rehabilitation down here in the bayous. For us, his "mistakes" do not end at Gettysburg.
mjs:
"King of the Hill” is a abomination..."
I agree with Steve Sailer:
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/060326_judge.htm
"Hank Hill, hero of King of the Hill, exemplifies the traditional American male virtues in an age that holds them in contempt. Much of the comedy stems from Hank (who wistfully remarks of Ronald Reagan, "I miss voting for that man") doing battle with the pretensions of Northeastern liberalism and the rapacity of globalized corporatism."
And:
"On a more profound level, King of the Hill shows how tradition can help economize on IQ. Like many sit-com dads, Hank isn't terribly clever. Yet, in sharp contrast to Homer Simpson and the rest of the Doofus Dads on TV, Hank is, in his modest way, wise.
While hardly flawless—he's a comic cartoon character, after all—Hank is a better decision-maker than the higher-testing bureaucrats, educrats, and executives he clashes with because he's absorbed the best lessons about how a man should live his life from an out-of-fashion older American culture."
The so-called culture displayed in movies, videos, music, etc., etc. is like plastic, ready made by the corporations that fabricate it. They own the recording studies, the radio stations, the magazines, and all the rest. They create, promote and sell a culture that they also sell all the accouterments for. They create what is cool to their own profit. I see it as another example of Dr. Wilson’s second comment. We live in an era when the elite are doing everything necessary to squeeze every last possible red cent of profit, right now at this very moment, without any regard for the future. The illegal immigration situation is another perfect example. The evils associated with money that the Bible warned us of is wholly ignored, along with wisdom in general. But, alas, the future (time to pay the piper) does indeed approach. And I’m afraid it will be horrific.
On another note, the only Hank's I know of are Hank Williams and Jr.
Dr. Wilson,
"War always involves to some extent exploitation of the young by the old and exploitation of the poor and humble by the rich and well-placed. However, in all places and times, the rich and well-placed have been obliged to share some of the risk and sacrifice. Except 21st century America."
According to my paternal grandmother, who relayed to her grandkids the stories of her youth and of the people who shared that youth, her father-in-law, my great-grandfather who served in the 12th Louisiana, did not particularly like the Bourbon Redeemer's of Louisiana, a political cadre made up, for the most part, of former Confederate officers from Louisiana. She said that he referred to them as the "plantation boys." Yet, as far the war itself, there was, she told us, a certain fondness he held for them; for they or their kinsmen died as did other Confederate soldiers, were wounded as other Confederate soldiers and shared four years of misery. She said that my great-grandfather, when retelling his experiences, would, when he related the story of one officer, quietly cry. Apparently, the officer and his body servant, an old slave, had managed to survive the war and were among the little band of men, about twelve, who made the long trek on foot from North Carolina back to Louisiana. Along the way, the officer, who apparently came from another regiment which had surrendered with the Army of Tennessee, died. The band of men managed to bury him in a local cemetery somewhere in Mississippi. The old slave carried his personal effects back to Louisiana. The officer had apparently been from the area of Lake Providence, Louisiana. When they arrived at the officer's home, a plantation on the Mississippi, it was gone - burned, overgrown and barren. (Grant had passed that way in 1863.) The band, now reduced to about nine, left the old slave there and themselves began to disperse to their own towns and yeoman farms, such as might have been left.
I suppose my grandmother's recollections of my great-grandfather's memories contains a salute to a rich plantation boy who shared common miseries with yeoman farmers as they, together, struggled to defend home and hearth against an invader determined to conquer, loot, burn and kill.
"Would this [King of the Hill] be an authentic expression of Southern folk culture?"
Perhaps twenty years ago it was not, but the suburbanization and deracination of the South have steadily marched on. In some places (Atlanta and South Florida come to mind) it has become as much or more of a problem than in the Atlantic North--probably more at this point, because the latter states are actually losing population. (Take comfort: the lefties are not breeding. They are killing themselves off!)
I love listening to old people whine about culture,You created the world we live in,You maximized efficiency,You started the last centuries wars,You let Madison ave. out of there shell,You allowed unchecked immigration,and MY generation has to clean up the mess,
Thanks a lot! BTW I'm44 yrs of age and a hard core conservative,
Bob
And you don't get King of the hill at all
Bob
The simple fact that we're talking about "King of the Hill" at all is a commentary about the state of American culture. This stuff isn't culture, it's junk food passing for authentic sustenance. We've sold our birthright -- the high heritage of Europe -- for a mess of pottage by turning the arts and entertainment into commodities, like everything else in our corporatocracy. I'm waiting for the day when the bright boys figure out how to make a killing by packaging and selling a market-tested brand of the Lord GOD Almighty ...
"I’m waiting for the day when the bright boys figure out how to make a killing by packaging and selling a market-tested brand of the Lord GOD Almighty"
Have you never been to a Pentacostal church?
Bobnormal, did do you really think Mr. Wilson or any of the above posters were responsible for the above problems? When was the last time traditional conservatives had a say in culture anyway?
And we twenty-sometimes are the ones who get to complain about past generations. --Young arch-conservative
ECHS1967:
"The simple fact that we’re talking about “King of the Hill” at all is a commentary about the state of American culture. This stuff isn’t culture, it’s junk food passing for authentic sustenance. We’ve sold our birthright — the high heritage of Europe..."
There's a difference between high culture and low culture. Only the most Frankfurt School-ish elitest discards all popular low culture as inherently junk. Even with all the cynical mass-produced pap the USA is a lot better off than my country (UK) in terms of low or folk culture output that is an organic expression of the people.
Example - popular music - in the UK there is an almost 100% complete rejection of our own musical heritage. As far as the British are concerned, modern music is something that was invented by black Americans, brought to perfection by Elvis, and exported to the UK. All British popular music sees itself as simply copying a purely American style. There is practically *no* British popular music that is an organic expression of the British people, tracing its roots back into our own antiquity. Folk music is a laughed-at ghetto with no connection to the mainstream.
I believe the rest of western Europe is in similar dire straits; eastern Europe has retained much more of its own heritage, which is one reason why eastern European countries always win the Eurovision Song Contest these days (this year it was Serbia).
One strange result of this is that the British elite, starved of their own tradition, and in principle highly contemptuous of all things American (country music especially), turn eagerly to apparently authentic expressions of American musical folk culture - bluegrass of course, but also c&w singers like Steve Earle and Laura Cantrell.
I'm 34 btw, one of the young-ish fogeys.
Generations. I was born 6 months before Pearl Harbour---therefore, as Grandmother used to point out---was under no suspicion of being in the dubious status of a "war baby," product of a hasty and perhaps ill-considered wartime liason.
While my and the preceding generation were nothing to brag about, it is my strong impression that the immediate following generation was where everything really took a nosedive--- those who came to majority in the 60s. This was the first generation of suburbanization, affluence, television, coerced egalitarianism, and therapeutically managed society.
P.S. the current rising generation are tougher and more honest than their 60s parents---they have to be---but they are also cynical and post-civilizational.
Clyde Wilson:
"P.S. the current rising generation are tougher and more honest than their 60s parents—they have to be—but they are also cynical and post-civilizational."
I think that's a very fair analysis. My generation are determined to do better than our baby-boomer era parents, but we don't have a hell of a lot left to work with.
Dr. Wilson's remark, "Except 21st century America,” brings to mind the following grudging concession made by George Orwell -- certainly no apologist for the upper class:
"One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are *morally* fairly sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed."
Simon Newman: "There’s a difference between high culture and low culture. Only the most Frankfurt School-ish elitest discards all popular low culture as inherently junk."
I agree entirely -- it worries me sometimes that some traditionalists tend to think as if high-culture is the only culture worth acknowledging.
The problem with contemperary pop isn't that it's popular; the problem with contemperary pop is that it's *bad*. Period.
I submit that the lack of high culture and the lack of low culture may be related problems.
Perhaps in order to have a high-culture we must have a low-culture foundation upon which to grow it. Methinks, there would be far more long-term benefit in a renewal of American low-culture than in some misguided effort to force everybody to love Tchaikovsky.
For that matter, I'm a little disturbed at the suggestion that those who can't appreciate high-culture should just be left to wallow in the abyss; we are not the aesthetic equivalent of gnostics, I hope.
In any case, to reify high-culture and shun low-culture is to be part of the problem, not part of the solution. It's an expression of the heresy of egalitarianism, only from the opposite end.
One reason why the world got into the shape it's in is because Henry Higgins-ish educrats proclaimed that every last peasant could & should master the sciences, get grammar training by which to exorcise them of their lower-class speech patterns, attend the opera regularly, and recite poetry at the drop of a hat.
Part of our quandary is that among the educated, everybody wants to be a cultivated nobleman and nobody wants to be a serf.
Hence the role of serf has lost its dignity. If we define "working-class" as a state of degradation, the definition becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Hierarchy is more like an organic tree than the simple, linear scale many traditionalists mistakenly assume it to be -- i.e., the misguided notion that 10 = king, (great), 8 = civilized country squire (good), 5 = a folk artist (OK), and 2 = a common carpenter (bad).
Everybody wants to be one of the tree's delicately perfumed flowers shining in the sun, and nobody wants to be one of the roots stuck down in the earth.
Yet I'd say that in the true sense of the word "culture", there are plenty of small-town barbers, Chesapeake Bay oystermen, and backwoods country preachers who are more genuinely cultured than many of the posters on this board, regardless of how much Greek we've studied or whether we recognize the strains of Bach.
Reification of high-culture also ties into consumerism -- I've known many afficionados of "high-culture" who are different from patrons of Hooters only in that their tastes are more refined.
But that is a difference in degree, not kind. Culture that is simply "savored" without having any context to one's lived life as a social creature is not culture at all, but rather a psychological hors d'oervre.
Yum yum, delicious.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not belittling classical education, but we need to keep in mind that classical education in the year 2007 operates in a very different context than classical education in the year 1492.
We should not try to pretend to be something we're not -- the protagonist of Fahrenheit 451 is much more similar to modern man than, say, Odysseus.
We can learn from Odysseus too, of course -- but sometimes it's important to look to situations, narratives, and imagery that tie more tightly into the here-and-now.
Is Ray Bradbury high-culture, or low-culture?
Do such terms even have relevance anymore in a country which defines itself via consumerism?
"Aside from a few fragmentary remnants, America has nothing that can be called a high culture and nothing that can be called a folk culture. It has a material culture—which has lost its creative and productive edge, and a pop culture—which is steadily sinking to the lowest common denominator." -CW
Just like the elite and their management class has dictated the terms in the mainstream political arena for both right and left. This MEDIA driven and maintained oppression pervades all aspects of american life. And is why there's no legitimate high culture, and why even country music in terms of folk culture (if you consider that to be) is also compromised in so far as it aspires to be recognized.
In Education today no child left behind really means more or most children left behind; along with most of the best teachers today who are subsequently leaving the classrooms. The federal government can do NOTHING right, due to the reality that centralization NEVER works. Only localization works and the more local the better because it's real time.
___________________
G.S., you have scored a bulls-eye. A society that merely consumes high culture created by others has no high culture (i.e., U.S.). And a genuine folk culture is the basis of any high culture. Except for remnants in the rural and small-town South, America has no folk culture. It has not had any since the Puritans, enemies of all that was natural, traditional, and popular, started sending cultural commissars out from Massachusetts Bay in the early 19th century.
If only Lee had not invaded Pennsylvania... if only Richmond had not devolved into centralized, confiscating tyranny... if only the South had used its geography and climate to its advantage, bogging down Lincoln's Invaders in a miserable 4GW war (which America has proven inept at fighting since 1959)...
If only...
to all of you goofballs- All we have in this country is cheesy Jew culture.
"Only the most Frankfurt School-ish elitest discards all popular low culture as inherently junk."
"The problem with contemperary pop isn’t that it’s popular; the problem with contemperary pop is that it’s *bad*. Period."
Very well-said. Bluegrass and Southern "country" music (at least the older sort that has not been submitted to electronic/rock/disco trappings) may not be to my liking, but that is probably a matter of taste and ability to relate. And I do at times appreciate them; there are after all affinities with the folk tunes of Britain and Ireland, which I do enjoy a great deal.
By the way, while "indigenous" New England folk music may not be known, I have at least heard testimonials that it does exist, at least from a medieval Art Historian from NYC who apparently plays in a folk group in Cambridge. Also, Puritans and Unitarians are *not* the only groups who settled in that region. In fact, I have a CD full of Irish-American ballads that were popular around the 1860's. (Granted, many people here will not appreciate the pro-Unionist content of some of the songs, but it hardly approaches verse six of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic.") "Irish folk" may not be "indigenously American" (whatever that means), but it is alive and well in that area, no longer *exclusively* an "import." And don't forget the Québécois (largely Anglicized by now, but still...).
"Is Ray Bradbury high-culture, or low-culture? "
Well, since I don't know who Ray Bradbury even is, I would say herein lies the problem --- we have no culture. Hardly anything left that we share in common and cultivate together. I do know Odysseus, however, so perhaps not all will be lost, " on our way home." As to the rest, I thought your post was most excellent. rr
Both my parents were war babies and yes they are to blame as well,
Nobody stood up when all of the 60s changes were happening,I won't speak to my uncle anymore(he's 54) all he could say is "at least we tried" My vietnam veteran(59-70)dad told me "do or don't ,NEVER try" My generation Will fix our cultural demise No one else seems to want to other than whine about "the good old days".If they were so good why are we as a nation in the pathetic state we are,HMMM?
Bob
G.S.,
We have had this conversation before, and I agree that it is not helpful to dismiss popular culture just because it is popular. Who is going to live out, support, vote for our ideas if not the people?
I think some country music and a lot of bluegrass music is worthwhile. Country is at least rhetorically friendly to useful emotions like nostalgia, attachment to home, etc., often celebrates rural America, and isn't completely sex drenched. Southern Gospel strikes me as a legitimate product of a particular folk culture, although not really "popular." (I guess the cynic could say that has been vulgarized by Gaither.)
BTW, I believe you are a fan of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I believe The Invasion, which opens today, is essentially a remake of that. I may try to catch it.
*All we have in this country is cheesy Jew culture.*
To take what you don't like and define that as "Jewish" is contemptible. Or do you feel our culture suffers from the influence of the Bible, as well? And do you account for the many other Jewish contributions to world culture by not putting them in the box of what you call "Jewish"?
And by the way, who's buying, and driving the market for, the culture you decry? A lot more than 2% of the population.
Your comments are ugly, lazy and, most importantly, distract from the fact the the American people have to look to themselves as a whole, not distinct sub-groups, for the causes of, and solutions to, their problems.
ECHS1967: “I’m waiting for the day when the bright boys figure out how to make a killing by packaging and selling a market-tested brand of the Lord GOD Almighty”
Nicholas G.P. Moses: "Have you never been to a Pentacostal church?"
Nice, Mr. Moses. Real nice. Although pentecostal Christians are distant cousins -- indeed, very distant cousins -- of mine, they are still kin, and thus I must protest this casual expression of disrespect. Besides, Sir, there's no way they fit my metaphor. They are fringe religionists, nowhere near the mainstream. They have very low market share ...
"P.S. the current rising generation are tougher and more honest than their 60s parents—they have to be—but they are also cynical and post-civilizational."
What do you mean by post-civilizational? I've never read of that term before.
I raise Catahoula Leopards and train them to hunt and bay feral hogs. When the pups get about half their mature size, about 40 to 50 pounds, I let them run with the big dogs. I do not think that my pups are cognizant of their awkwardness and their ignorance, but they do enjoy the hunt and the run. That's were I am on these fora and threads of the Chronicle: a pup running with the big dogs. I do enjoy the hunt and the run, however. You big dogs be patient with me as I blissfully bound along with y'all on these topics. Don't let some big hog pen me against a tree!
Now, to culture I would say that it, if it is genuine and beautiful (a word almost devoid of meaning today), is a mere byproduct of a society striving for excellence.
I hold that a society is striving for excellence if it embraces the meta-ethical theory of 'realism' versus 'non-realism' and holds that moral value is an intrinsic property of the world to be discovered or intuited. Within the domain of meta-ethical theory of realism, there is, of course the option: the theological (God) versus merely the natural. I opt for God, and particularly the understanding of God as He reveals Himself in the Christ.
One's ethics, the good, will determine one's standpoint or perspective or how one senses the world - aesthetics.
With the wane of Christian values (ethics) has come the shift in standpoint and perspective (aesthetics). Art, in all of its forms -music, performing arts, the fine arts, writing - is a major component of culture, although not the only component thereof. Today, art is either a byproduct of a decadent culture as measured from the Christian standard (ethics) or is an instrument used to destroy or deconstruct the last vestiges of art and culture produced at a time when Christianity was the driving ethical force in most of Western society - from the patterns made by the "lowly" weaver to the poetry of the artful prince. In addtion, art and the culture which to both reflects and makes have become "zweckentfremdet" or "estranged from purpose." No longer is the effort to gloryfy God, regardless on which level of society the effort is being made, or to edify the church or to serve as intellectual capital in the didactic effort to teach, noting the biblical stories told on medieval church doors or in stained glass. Art and culture, like sex, zweckentfremdet (no children or marriage in the case of sex), are but a masturbation of self-indulgence and consumerism in the negative sense of that word.
As a Southerner, for example, I see Miss Flannery O'Conner as being an example of one writing from her strata within American society and with her purpose producing a meaningful contribution to our culture in the form of art through writing. She is not Shakespeare, but she is not writing from his strata or for his strata. This quote from Miss O'Connor reflects my understanding of her.
"All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal."
This has been an attempt of the puppy to run with the big dogs on this issue as it has evolved, if I may use that expression, from the initial post of Dr. Wilson.
Doctor Wilson,
The apparently comfortable use of the term "Congresspersons", with all its high dudgeon pseudohistory of brave battle with and glorious escape from phallocentrism and fascist male hegemony, when juxtaposed with a sincere concern with our current state of deficiency in anything resembling a 'high culture', leaves me quite puzzled. I see part of our loss of high culture ( whatever that is; but, though I do not always know where the line between 'high' ---or, better expressed, robust and virtuous--- and 'low' is, I know which side of it I am on ) as due to our failure to defend our beliefs in it. Though submission via acceptance and use of these horrid "-----person" neologisms we see popping out of the muck every day like lungfish seems a minor loss, it is an admission of their legitimacy and thus, indirectly but surely, an admission of guilt and inferiority on the part of any defender of what remains of our 'high' culture. Battles are often lost, not at the bulwarks or the narrow hot gates, but beneath our walls by the covert miners, or behind our backs down undefended goat paths. Our culture, the child of our tradition, and father to our posterity, communicates with and is communicated by our language. To have our tongues so beaten, so bloodied and swollen that we can no longer make ourselves heard, is an Orwellian misery we need not inflict on ourselves.
I have no solution to the barbarians now so far within our gates. Some, I fear, are like Cavafy's effete nobleman who saw them as indeed being the solution. For myself, my fields are harvested, my larders replete. It is time to beat my plowshare back into a sword.
"Except for remnants in the rural and small-town South, America has no folk culture. It has not had any since the Puritans, enemies of all that was natural, traditional, and popular, started sending cultural commissars out from Massachusetts Bay in the early 19th century."
I think this is something of an exaggeration. New England was a center of folk art in the nineteenth century, and the most well-known* folk artist of the twentieth century, Grandma Moses, was a Yankee from upstate New York. The folk song tradition of New England is less well-known than that of the South, and probably rightly so, but it does exist, especially if we include sea shanties as a form of folk song. (Not to mention Shaker hymns - their theology was, of course, absurd and extremely opposed to the "natural, traditional, and beautiful," but their tunes came out of the folk tradition.)
The greatest** of all traditional ballad collectors, Francis Child, was a native of Boston and a strong supporter of the Union during the Civil War. (He attempted to enlist in the Army but was rejected for health reasons.) Other New England-born cultural figures who would hardly qualify as enemies of the "natural, traditional, and popular" include Thomas Bullfinch (whose famous volumes of mythology include extensive sections on the legends of Britain and Christian Europe in addition to the well-known sections on Greece and Rome), Child's protege and successor George Lyman Kittredge, the Anglo-Catholic and very traditional architect Ralph Adams Cram, and the ardent admirer of medieval Catholicism (albeit Unitarian-turned-agnostic in his own personal views) Henry Adams.
The small-town New England culture of town meetings, quilting bees, the Old Famer's Almanac, maple syrup production, and white-steepled Congregational churches on the town green may not be a culture Dr. Wilson finds very attractive, and I certainly don't approve of the Congregational part of it, but I think it is hard to deny that than in its prime it was as authentic a folk culture as that of the South.
* It wouldn't surprise me if Dr. Wilson says that her fame is due to a Yankee conspiracy to exalt her at the expense of more talented Southern folk artists, but it can't be denied that she was well-known and she did create a large number of well-received folk paintings.
** As with Grandma Moses, I am not an expert in this field and am open to the idea that Child is receiving undeserved credit while Southerners who were actually greater have been forgotten, but there seems to be a near-unanimous scholarly consensus on this point.
LQC: I think it was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek.
J.K:
Ahhhh....! And I had assumed an unconscious example of "corruptio optimi pessima". If not so, I am quilty of the very intemperate reflexive ejaculations of the traditionless 'politically correct' termites I so deplore. My defence can only be a skin rubbed so raw by constant forced contact with the buffoons who are our current unelected 'elite' that my attrited nerves are jangled.
My presumptions concerning Dr. Wilson's intentions were uncharitable: cuiquam in sua arte credendum. Mea culpa; I'd best return to farming.
Mr. Peters, you are no pup in anybody's pack. Lucius, you need to work on your sense of irony. Mr. Kabala, I did not say that New England had no folk culture. I said it was the source of the eradication of much cultural inheritance. The Shakers were transported from England. Collectors like Francis Child and Bulfinch are admirable scholars but not creators in a living tradition. (By the way, great scholars are even rarer than great writers, painters, and composers.)
By "post-civilizational" I mean they have been largely disconnected from their native religion, their native tongue, their native manners and morals, and any consciousness of the dignity and duties of Western man.
The South and anything/everything Southern has been under attack for so long as inferior. And - now that so many Southerners have been driven from their heritage in shame - we discover that the substitute and alternative isn't worth having. My grandparents were right! Dr. Wilson, I wonder if the most blame can't be laid on the 'greatest generation'? In their mad rush to escape the depression, they bought into and accepted things that earlier generations had scoffed at. I know my parents' views differed greatly from my grandparents'.
From my grandmother's perspective, the daughter of a yeoman farmer, things began to change during and after WWI. She said that military camps sprang up and that with them came a shock of relative affluence, for those "lucky" enough to get jobs in and around them, and a new wave of vices that upland Louisianans had not experienced before.
I also hold that the nascent industry of movies and radio, themselves mere media, nevertheless brought messages of aspiration and "hope" which were alien to the agrarian and rural environments of the South and the Midwest.
I do not believe that my grandmother was aware of the influences of these media in the 20's and 30's; however, I do recall her reflecting as to why, when folks around her had been very poor but content right up to the 1930's, had they suddenly wanted what they had not had and just as suddenly expected to get it. I suggest that the short of it is that the Depression, as it passed through the rural South, went as unnoticed as a massive tsunami passing under a small bark on the high seas. It only reached its destructive potential when it washed upon the affluent shores of urban and cosmopolitan America. The rural and agrarian South had been in depressionesque poverty since the War for Southern Independence, Reconstruction and the great depleting. The 1927 Flood, compared to which Katrina was a mere minnow fart in backwater, had devastated the South's South, namely the massive Mississippi Delta. Why then did Southerner's respond so willingly to the machinations of the New Deal? Too many of them had served in Wilson's armies which had fostered a centralized nationalism alien to the South; and those media had brought to them aspirations and hopes that were actually alien to their needs and culture. A substantial core of Southerners had been made part of the collective mind through their experiences in the armies and the bureaucracies of Wilson. Many others had acquired wants far beyond their needs. Thus, Southerners vicariously became part of the Great Depression and grasped at its alleged remedies as did everyone else. Those alleged remedies were, of course, the diseases of which they claimed to be the cure; nevertheless, the addiction thereunto was on.
WWII merely accelerated the malaise.
Mr Newman: Several years ago, I was buying CDs of whatever I could get of old folk music from the British Isles. I could find examples galore of folk music from the Celtic lands, but nothing from England. The closest I got to English folk music was a collection of naughty and banal tavern songs from the 1600's which weren't even worth listening to. There must be a lot more to English folk music than that. If you could give me any names etc., any pointers to learning something about authentic English folk music, from any period of English history, I would be grateful.
Concerning New England folk music, I would like to learn something about that as well, since after all, stemming as it did from older music of the Isles, it must be considered as another branch of the same musical traditions that Southern folk music came from, regardless of it's popularity or relative merits vis a vis Southern music. Any suggestions, anyone?
What about folk music and culture in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey?
Since I'm being greedy, does anyone know just where, in fact, do fragments of real high culture still exist and what form they take? I'm more interested in the Southern high culture, but in our day and age, one cant be too choosy, so any American, Canadian, or European high culture will do.
Mr Wilson - I'm afraid your experience is typical. My wife likes the folk group Steeleye Span; some of their numbers I believe are of English origin, such as Blackleg Miner* - about harrassing/killing non-Union labour. I think such 'protest songs' about crushing the enemies of socialism comprise the only living folk tradition in England, the singer Billy Bragg is a well known exemplar.
*My Tenneseean wife enjoys the song, although she is an inveterate foe of the Unions since representatives of a Detroit car union tried to blow up her grandfather when he was deputy mayor of a small town in Tennessee and a Detroit auto firm relocated there seeking non-Unionised labour. I believe the Union was eventually run out of town and the plant remained non-Unionised.
"Nice, Mr. Moses. Real nice. Although pentecostal Christians are distant cousins — indeed, very distant cousins — of mine, they are still kin, and thus I must protest this casual expression of disrespect."
I can applaud the fraternal ethic inherent in that protest; however, I stand my ground. I attended high school with a fairly large number of Pentecostals and attended their church on occasion. I was fairly indifferent or even impressed by the display at that tender age; in retrospect, however, I must opine that a half-hour of socializing, snack bars, X-Box, table tennis, etc. before a concert of "hard-rocked" hymns is *QUITE* shameless, as are the huge profits raked in by the "Contemporary Christian" music industry. (And the popularity of that genre suggests that that particular segment, which granted is not exclusively the domain of Pentecostals, is hardly "fringe.") Perhaps mine is not a typical experience, but where I have observed Pentecostalism and its more mild sister the Evangelical Megachurch, they have truly been religions of the suburbs: sometimes well-meaning, generally naïve and often contrived.
"Since I’m being greedy, does anyone know just where, in fact, do fragments of real high culture still exist and what form they take?"
University of Notre Dame's School of Architecture.
I agree with Mr. Peters analysis of our decline. Not only did Southerners begin to thirst after what they did not want before, but they became ASHAMED of not having it. The Yankee Chamber of Commerce mentality spread all over as a result. This is what Faulkner meant with the Snopeses. In the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, the business elite of Nashville were deeply ashamed of country music and the Agrararin writers, the only things of value that they had. They wanted to hide them and seem more of a progressive big city---like, say, Cleveland. When I was a young reporter in Charlotte the business and political elite were obsessed with imitating Atlanta. I always said that if Atlanta had a leper hospital, they would want one too. Undoubtedly the disrupotion and primitive nationalism of the two World Wars and the Cold War had an effect. Remember also, the the whole leftist apparatus of the world, from the 1930s until the present, made the South a primary focus of their destruction.
I recently saw Mel Gibson's Apocalypto? While I'm not about to partake in a play, a song, or dance, celebrating the lessons taught in that movie, I did come away with the lessons and their examples ready on my mind.
So I venture to present it as a tiny bit of recent American culture.
I hesitated to post this for a while since it was written by a Masonic Yankee rake, and was initially pointed out to me years ago by a Straussian, but here goes: "Information to Those Who Would Remove to America, by Benjamin Franklin." "...The Truth is, that though there are in that Country few people so miserable as the Poor of Europe, there are also very few that in Europe would be called rich' it is rather a general happy Mediocrity that prevails. There are few great Proprietors of the Soil, and few Tenants; most People cultivate their own Lands, or follow some Handicraft or Merchandise; very few rich enough to live idly upon their Rents or Incomes, or to pay the high Prices given in Europe for Paintings, Statues, Architecture, and the other Works of Art, that are more curious than useful. Hence the natural Geniuses, that have arisen in America with such Talents, have uniformly quitted that Country for Europe, where they can be more suitably rewarded. ..."
Post-civilizational.....ya that's me, and to some extent many of my generation.
Cut off from a better culture of a distant half-remembered past. Living in a over-commercialized over-educated, but wisdomless cultural wasteland.
We call it California.