Tag: Culture Wars

Here’s my admission: I’ve never watched Breaking Bad. I never watched it because the inherent premise of it — a good man forced into crime by circumstance — was abhorrent to me, and because I’ve always been the guy who tried to do what was right regardless of circumstance.

But lately, I’m starting to think I may have been an idiot all these years, because when the system can be so easily gamed by people with fewer scruples and lower morals than mine, what’s the point of being the good guy?

Over at Return of Kings, some guy makes the same point in an article entitled In A Broken America, Only The Dishonorable Are Rewarded. (By the way, I love articles whose titles make reading the thing unnecessary, but you should read it anyway.) In true RoK fashion, he refers to people like me as “dupes”, and in his frame of the situation, he’s probably quite right.

Fortunately, of course, I’m in the majority of the population because up until now, most people can be counted on to do the right thing. I suspect too that this is why Social Security is pretty much untouchable: not because of the greediness of retirees, but because having done the right thing their whole lives and paid into the system (albeit at gunpoint), people are insistent that government also does the right thing and delivers on their promise by supporting retirees.

That government might one day renege on that promise is the stuff of nightmares — and not just for the cheated retirees, either.

What concerns me is that our public morality is becoming frayed by the increasing growth of private immorality. When I stated above that the “majority” of people can be counted on to do the right thing, what happens when that majority becomes a lot less so, and the wrongdoers become ascendant? Which, I think, is Furioso’s underlying point of his article, albeit not enunciated as such. If everybody else is cheating, then why aren’t you? It’s an enticing question, and sadly, a seductive one.

Even worse is that the wrongdoers,  by cheating and abusing the system, make thing intolerable for those who are on the straight and narrow. No better example can be found than in the pain management scenario, where people who are experiencing real and excruciating pain on a daily basis are finding it increasingly difficult to obtain the drugs needed to treat their condition because a jillion fuckups are abusing opiates and government, of course, is applying legislation like a hammer when what’s called for is a scalpel. My late wife was actually fired by two pain management medical practices because the doctors were finding the burden of government intervention and intrusiveness too difficult — and career-threatening — for Connie’s care to be in their best interest. Only when she was diagnosed with cancer did her care improve, because (as the new doctor explained), government doesn’t actually care about terminal patients because their condition is finite.

Imagine my reaction to that little nugget of information. And no, I didn’t load up the old AK-47 and pay a visit to the nearest government office. What I wanted to do was load up the AK and start paying visits to the cockroaches who had created this situation by abusing the drugs which my wife desperately needed. Seriously, had I known the Breaking Bad guy in person, I would have been mightily tempted to slaughter him, his dealers and every single “patient” who used his product. But not even I have enough ammo to make that problem go away because cockroaches seem to be in infinite supply these days.

I worry about this situation, about this waning of public morality. In fact, I worry about this more than I worry about any other aspect of modern society — more than un-Constitutional campus speech codes, more than corrupt IRS officials who target conservatives, and far more than the Russians (who are surely the best example of nationally-degraded public morality) attempting to fiddle with our electoral system.

And I know that our beloved government is worried about it too. How else can you explain the recent huge purchases of guns and ammunition by the Fedgov, and the arming of the thousands of federal agents and bureaucrats who are not even close to being in actual law enforcement?

Never before has W.B. Yeats’s Second Coming been more chilling:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

At the risk of sounding apocalyptic: keep your powder dry and your guns at hand, folks. Because when more than a few decent folks start to break bad, it’s SHTF time.

I’ve talked about this topic before but it needs repeating, I think, because it’s a serious one.

Sarah Hoyt points me to this article about the difficulties of dating outside one’s political purview. Well, duh. In my parents’ time, it was religion that could be the sticking point. Never mind the big differences (Jews and Christians etc.): there were huge problems within the same religious groups too (Orthodox vs. Reform Jews, Catholic vs. Protestant Christians, and so on). The old saw was: “Never marry outside your faith”, because the schism was regarded as too deep to be overcome by marriage and could prove to be a fatal obstacle to happiness. Of course, that means that there’s a fundamental difference between philosophies: was Christ truly the Son of God, or just a major prophet? Serious stuff.

As the political process has become polarized, of course it wasinevitable that political differences would spill over into the social sphere. The differences were always there, of course: I remember howling with laughter at the 1960s Ann Landers story of the woman whose husband hid her dentures on Voting Day so that she couldn’t go out and vote Democrat. (Nowadays, she’d sue him for violating her civil rights and file for divorce, but that’s a rant for another time.)

Some differences can be ignored, of course; when I first met The Mrs., I used to refer to her as my “Liberal Rubbish Girlfriend” because she was living in Beverley Hills and hated guns. Maybe nowadays the latter would be a sticking-point (it would be for me), but back then it was different — and she was socially- and politically conservative. (Of course, she later came round to my way of thinking on guns and became a proud gun owner but I’ve told that story before.)

But I honestly think that political viewpoints have now sharpened to the point where social interaction has become almost impossible to people of such polarized opinion as progressive-liberal vs. conservative; it’s become a Christian / Muslim-type schism rather than a mild Episcopal / Presbyterian difference, if you will. Now, there is a fundamental and contradictory conflict as to how society should work: the primacy of the individual and minimal government presence vs. the State as the primary societal manager. What hasn’t helped is that the Left has progressively [sic] sharpened the political terminology whereby conservatives are now regarded as absolutely evil (Bush/Romney/Trump = Hitler). (As I’ve said before, the irony is that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, in terms of political action — never mind just philosophy —  are both far closer to Hitler’s statism than any prominent Republican has ever been. But the Left is impervious to irony: Freedom is Slavery, remember?)

Speaking personally, there is absolutely no way I could ever date a liberal woman because frankly, I have always been a man who enjoys to talk to my dates and show them respect (I know, how old-fashioned of me); but at some point, the conversations about neo-Impressionist art or Romantic Classical music would tail off and some kind of social discussion would begin… and soon grind to a halt amidst name-calling and invective.  You see, I can quite accommodate a woman’s opinion that Liszt is a better composer than Chopin (no, but never mind), whereas an opinion that government should enforce “hate speech” regulation is not just flawed but irretrievably wrong, and I can’t even begin to accommodate that. And if we get into a discussion of the welfare state and socialized medical care… well, it’s over.

The title of this piece is an Afrikaans expression for which the English idiom is “Birds of a feather flock together” — but the Afrikaans (lit. “type seeks the same type”) is a much stronger sentiment without the avian allusion. And “opposites attract” only works with magnets, by the way; for humans, opposites may initially attract — but eventually, repulsion sets in.

Choose your partners carefully.

Reminder: I was reading some article [no link, it was ages ago] wherein a so-called “style and etiquette” expert was making suggestions for the ages at which one should stop doing certain activities (e.g. wearing a bikini), and while I agreed with some of his statements, I found myself in stark disagreement with others. Here’s his #2 of when to stop doing things:

Women having long hair: age 40

Total bollocks. I don’t know of any actual men (i.e. who are not homosexual hairdressers, pussywhipped husbands, or beta male twerps) who like short hair on a woman. In fact, amongst most men of my acquaintance, short hair is a decided turnoff in that men often associate short hair with feminism, lesbianism or a woman who just doesn’t care about her appearance anymore (and in the last instance, they’re often woefully correct).

If you have beautiful hair, at any age, wear it long, ladies. Leave the cropped hairstyles to the lesbians and grannies. And yes, I know mommies cut their hair into “low-maintenance” styles because of children, which is a lousy excuse and ta-da! might make them look less attractive to their husbands (like anyone cares what those poor bastards think). Of course one can make excuses for women who have unfortunate hair — the thin, wispy Heather Locklear-kind which can’t hold a style or a curl; but apart from that, the longer the better.

No discussion of this topic would be complete without pitchurs, of course, and the most egregious example is the exquisite Anne Hathaway, who cut her wonderful hair short for a movie role (acceptable), then inexplicably kept it short  for well over a year thereafter (ugh).

Whoever persuaded her to keep her hair short must really have hated her. You see, she has very exaggerated features (huge eyes, wide mouth and thick lips which admittedly do work in her favor on stage). Longer hair keeps those features in perspective; but unless a woman has petite, regular facial features, the short hairstyle over-emphasizes them and just like Hathaway, will make her look like a caricature of herself.

And finally: bizarre hair colors and Skrillex (“Lisbet-Salander”) hairstyles should be abandoned when one graduates from college and the time for youthful experimentation has passed. Going beyond that, and I start to suspect psychological issues, e.g. Lisbet Salander (I know, she’s a fictional character; fake but accurate).

cc

Frankly, the only men who find such looks attractive are men with similar psychological issues. I should also point out that in the pickup artist (PUA) community, such hairstyles are catnip to guys looking for an easy lay.

Of course, every woman should be able to “express herself” and “choose what works for her” and all that feministical jive. I would politely suggest, however, that from the average man’s perspective he’d probably prefer that she doesn’t arrive at the wedding ceremony with a hairstyle like the above. And yeah, I know that women shouldn’t have to shape their appearance according to what attracts men. But that’s the reality of it. There’s a really good reason why Edwardian women kept their hair up in tight chignons during the day, and let it loose at night: the act of unpinning the hair and letting it fall past their shoulders was — and remains — an incredible aphrodisiac to men.

And finally, here’s an example of a woman who has kept her long hair way past the (“sensible”) age of 40:

I don’t think she looks good; I think she looks sensational.

I was reading some article wherein a so-called “style and etiquette” expert was making suggestions for the ages at which one should stop doing certain activities (e.g. wearing a bikini), and while I agreed with some of his statements, I found myself in stark disagreement with others. [pause while Longtime Readers pick themselves off the floor because they know I am more like the Church Lady than the Church Lady is like the Church Lady]

Here’s the first of his suggestions:

Computer games: age 18

I understand why he would think so. After all, the apparent reason why young people today, and I mean Millenials, are so socially inept is because they’re all trying to conquer World of Warcraft (WOW, as they call it) Level 76 or something, rather than actually interacting with other people [unspoken: like we old farts used to do]. Here’s the stereotype:

But Nazzo fast, Guido*. What Millennials have done is created a culture for themselves — listen to any group of Millennials (and I have three) talking, and within thirty seconds they’ll be speaking a different language which is incomprehensible to anyone other than their own generation. In other words, they are interacting with each other, but just using a platform — the Internet — which is different from what we Old ‘Uns used. And as for actual socialization (or as they wonderfully call it, meat space), there are all the ComicCons and suchlike to consider. ComicCon, in other words, is to the Snowflake Millennial Generation what a Grateful Dead concert was to the Filthy Hippie Generation. Think I’m kidding? Consider these two pics of ComicCon and a Dead farewell concert:

Other than the age difference, they are essentially the same picture: people at a cultural event, wearing costumes which identify them as being part of a distinct group, and each speaking a language which would most likely be incomprehensible to their grandparents.

“Yeah, but kids today lock themselves in their room and just play computer games all day!” is the moan.

If you haven’t done the Boomer equivalent of the Led Zeppelin haj — putting on the headphones and listening non-stop to all the Zep albums in chronological order without leaving your bedroom / college dorm — then you wouldn’t see the similarities. (Full disclosure: I’ve never done the Zep thing, but I have done the same with Steely Dan, more than once.)

I think every generation does this kind of thing — or have since maybe the Great War, or maybe even the beginning of the 20th century. Of course, the Millennials have opened themselves up to ridicule:

Then again, you should hear the shit they say about us.

I’ll be doing more of these as the fancy takes me. It’s a rich vein, and it gives me a chance to do one of my favorite things: generational mockery.

*look up “Guido Nazzo” here for an explanation of my obtuse inside joke