After giving up comments–long after I thought he would for his own sanity
he catches Tom Roeser using highly similar language to Allan Bloom regarding many issues including rock music and sex.
By this 5-pronged standard Christianity is largely out-of-date. When we enlightened ones discard it we all feel liberated, although we don’t care to recall that it presents massacre of the unborn, intolerance of people who love the old ways, destructive pride in ourselves, the feeling that, after all, there is nothing worth dying for, a kind of insidious pleasure in confronting the pitiless nature of man. Time was when the unifying creed was America’s culture; but these times are different and America has no significant culture but rock music. It has great appeal; barbaric appeal to sexual wantonness, undeveloped and untutored. The young understand that rock has the cadence of sexual intercourse and they revel in the industry that develops the taste for orgiastic state of orgasm associated with sex, celebrating puppy love and polymorphous attractions that shield them from traditional shame. The good thing is that it is LOUD. Obviating much of shared speech that Aristotle insisted is the only common ground. No-no. What is real is the grunt, bodily contact, a throwback to cannibalism and gladiatorial combats.
The credo that succeeds moralistic absolutes is rock and increasingly the self…longing for a world without constraint…antinomianism…which will overcome the ancient codes that restrict and supplant them with free sexual expressing, anarchism as what happened years ago at Woodstock, the drug-induced mining of the unconscious and giving it free rein. What we strive to become in this new society is like Mick Jagger…now old but still very-very relevant…passion’s plaything, a demon satyr, unencumbered by modesty. Yes that is what we have become. And we have just elected our Messiah who with his stylish black wife showed no concern about unwanted infants born from botched abortions dying in hospitals’ dirty linen closets. No-no-no, we don’t want to think about these things. Better to concentrate on the living…not dying things…education, for instance: not moralizing to children against their instincts but linking between what they feel and what they want to be. That’s education, not Western Civ.
That’s why in this new age of Obama we will all become even more tolerant…overcoming the shibboleth that culture should preserve the dominance of heterosexual white males…overturning the old dogma that American culture should be Eurocentric…denying that this toleration shall mean the slowing of economic productivity, the vulgarization of scholarship. What do we do when we kind of recognize there should be a religion of some sort but reason by itself can’t find it? We turn to us. “We are the change we’ve been waiting for!” Does that strike a chord? We turn to creative, artistic man-man passionately involved in Self: Pascal’s wager no longer based on God’s existence but in our own desire to be happy. We have seen it with our own Dear Leader: by innate human greatness man can attract followers, organize whole societies, provide inspiration and devise a culture neither reason nor religion can supply. Yes we ARE the change we’ve been waiting for!
Shorter Tom Roeser: GET OFF MY LAWN!
Or only heterosexual white males matter.
Which is what Allan Bloom’s work boils down to anyway. 1968 is the only reference Roeser and like minded twits can make. It’s 40 years later and Mick Jagger and Woodstock are not relevant anymore. The students in college today are serious and hard working and generally very much invested in a pluralistic society–one that values diversity instead of shunning it. And they recognize an old doddering fool who can only reference Michelle Obama as a black woman as an old doddering fool who needs to retire the keyboard and realize 1968 isn’t the defining moment he fantasizes it was.