Thursday, January 26, 2017

American Graffiti And The Destruction Of American Culture


Greetings and Felicitations once again!

Non-Americans used to often say that America had no culture.  That, of course, was a weak and ham-fisted attempt at insult, most often but not exclusively offered by Europeans.  While the intended insult was false, there was a thread in it that reached outward to a different, but closely related truth that can be readily made apparent with the question, "what is the nature of American culture?"

It is that question to which I now turn my eyes.

Last night I watched "American Graffiti".  It is one of my favorites.  However, there is a disturbing filament that runs through the entire film: it is the apparent infantilization of American youth that, so far as I can tell, began in earnest with the end of World War II.

I cannot claim to be a nit-level expert on the every-day culture of the American teen during that part of the twentieth century which preceded the second world war, but I do have a basic sense that it was in some ways notably different from that which rapidly arose in post-war America.  However, it does seem that the same forces that drove the post-war metamorphosis were at work pre-war, if in a notably attenuated fashion.  Before the war, the idolization of film stars and musical personalities had surely begun taking root, but the degree to which it had altered American thought seems to me to have been notably less than that after the war.

Once again before continuing, I must emphasize that some of what I put down here are my impressions, offered as food for thought, since I was born at the latter end of the period in question.  Anyone with superior knowledge of the specifics is most welcome to correct me in any detail or sweeping trend.

When the war came to an end, Americans breathed a huge sigh of relief and, it seems, became charged with a great vigor and enthusiasm for what they believed to be free living; that is, the life of free men.  And who wouldn't?  After four long years of relative deprivation, some fear of foreign aggression, and burying loved ones killed on alien soils, it was time to appreciate the beauty of life as an American.  We had avoided nearly all potential material damages to our own land, something for which the American people were undoubtedly very grateful.  It was time to love and live life with an intensity and joy only those who had felt the near sweep of disaster could, and we did.

The abandon with which we threw ourselves back into living was evident all around us, but perhaps no other indicator made as clear the degree to which this was the case as that of the American automobile.  This was one of the central structural devices employed in American Graffiti, as it focused largely on that cultural element that is so uniquely American: cruising.  We see hot rods and all manner of other vehicles down to the lowly VW Bug on the boulevards, making the circuits all night long into the wee hours of the morning.

What got me to thinking in a remembering sort of way is a scene where one of the protagonist characters, Steve, played by Ron Howard, and his girlfriend, find themselves at a sock hop at the school from which he had recently graduated only 8 weeks prior.  By means never made known in the film, the spotlights come on to them, cuing them that they are to dance for the rest in a manner similar to a homecoming event or the prom queen and king.  That is when my memory was touched off and the remembrance of my long-held opinions of high school culture came rushing back to me.  It was the utter infantility of this brand of social construct that struck me like an iron bar right in the kisser.

Here we had young adults, otherwise fairly well educated - very well by today's sorrowfully low standards - willingly participating in this wholly childish nonsense of faux and contrived social hierarchy.  Homecoming and queen/king.  The "football hero" who gets to screw all the cheerleaders. The apex predator jocks and said cheerleaders and the adoration they tend to receive, not to mention special treatments.

Aside from the cults of localized personality, there are the various external factors to which teens have been trained to focus their energies and devotion.  Bands are prime examples of this.  To wit, those that drive the young girls into emotional frenzies like the Beatles back in 1964.  The boys, taking a somewhat different timbre, are no less prone to their equivalent distractions.

Then there are the sports, football being perhaps the grand icon.  But there are all manner of others. Soccer has seen a precipitous rise.  Sk8ting, snowboarding, mountain biking and BMX, as well as a whole host of others.  Mind you, there is nothing wrong with these activities in themselves, but when they become all consuming and garner regard so serious as even life and death in some cases, something is amiss.

We could go on and on with the seemingly endless array of deeply distracting facets of teen life.  Let me not neglect to mention sex, while I'm at it.  Sure, it was always there, but today we have very young women and even girls now engaging in sexual congress, having assumed the protections of the pill and so on; the result has been the demotion of the significance of the sex act for many to nothing more than just another sport.  Note also the trend toward the removal of all pubic hair from both male and female; yet another subtle psychological factor that keeps the mind in the frameset of childhood.  Adults have pubic hair, children do not.

The crucial element at play here is not so much the distractions in themselves, but the fact that they are distractions.  "Distraction" implies something away from which attention is being directed.  That is the key issue.

Here I will state a central thesis, and before assessing me fit for the funny farm (say that three times fast), bear with me a bit.  The people of America, through its youth, have been attacked in a coordinated, concerted manner.  Of this there can be no question.  The only question that remains to be answered (and I doubt I have those answers with any definiteness) revolves around the nature of the conspiracies.

The possibilities include, but are not limited to, a true political conspiracy designed with definite purpose to weaken and effectively destroy American posterity for any of several possible and historically common reasons, a happenstance conspiracy of commercial greed intended to set the minds of people in a direction profitable to any of a very large set of business interests, or perhaps a combination of the two.  I cannot readily come up with others at the moment, but I am sure they must be out there.  However, these are the most significant, as well as the most likely, candidates, to my thinking.

Let us address the two unique possibilities in turn, beginning with the apparently less sinister.  I say "apparently" because intentions count for little in such matters, whereas outcomes count for everything.  In each case, the outcomes have been identical.

Commercial Gain

The case for commercial gain is strong and in my opinion undeniable.  We have seventy two years of history since the end of the war that attests to the wildly vigorous activity of "Madison Avenue".  Since those days, advertisers have thrown everything including the kitchen sink into their mix of tricks aimed at getting people to buy their wares, no matter how ridiculously useless or even dangerous they might prove.  The psychology applied has most often been to focus the thoughts upon the products as things so unbearably worthy of desire that the individual becomes nearly non-functioning until such time as the lust is sated with a purchase.

Consider how such things were done in the world of entertainment with teens being specifically targeted;  the idol-worship of singing stars that made girls swoon, or worse.  How about the great sports "heroes" over whom the boys might get into fisticuffs, arguing who is closer to the ideal, and which hero is best?  The list is endless and this sort of thing continues to this very day as teens are targeted very specifically for legions of products from foods to pimple medications, phones, cars, clothing, sports equipment, and so on down the line.

The point is that these mere things have been so successfully interjected into the consciousnesses of our youth that they distract them from the basic life skills that stand to lead them to become powerful adults. Whether that is intentional remains unclear.

But what is a "powerful adult"?  A simple question with not so simple answers.  I will, however, go broad-brush by saying that an adult is powerful when they are in full possession of themselves.  They think, act, choose, and feel for themselves, by their own authorship.  As the opinions and baiting of others takes greater and greater portions of one's individual autonomy away, he becomes increasingly less powerful.  The power to command oneself is the greatest power in the universe of humanity.

However, once acquired, such power is very difficult to steal away, if not impossible.  But denying the young the opportunity to become powerful in the first place... that is a horse much more easily broken to the saddle.  Ultimately speaking, adults of low power are far more readily controlled than those of a fuller measure.

Concerted Political Conspiracy

This possibility is much more difficult to sell to a large audience, yet I maintain that such things do indeed exist even today.  History is rotten with such conspiracies.  In the twentieth century alone we see clear evidence of endless conspiring to political ends.  The Turk's murdered at least two million Armenians in a conspiracy of "ethnic cleansing".  The same occurred in the 1990s in the various Balkan states.  Of these, there is no controversy.

In Russia, a great political conspiracy lead to the communist revolution and devolution of the so-called "soviet" people wherein perhaps as many as 100 million people were brutally slaughtered by their own government.  China with its "cultural revolution" butchered at least as many as did the Soviets, possibly more.  In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge followed hideous suit with their blindly stupid and inconceivably evil program to reduce every human being within their borders to clone-like sameness, all ostensibly in the name of their psychotic and pathologically demented notion of "equality".

Hitler gets his honorable mention as he brought the European continent into further conflagration, not without the help of the Polish and British governments, each of whom were conspiring to bring to loggerheads Germany with the rest of Europe.  To their credit, the French apparently refused the Polish entreaties to start something with Germany.  They'd had quite the bellyful of war.

Idi Amin, the Hutus and Tutsis, as well as a whole raft of other conspirators have been exposed, including the 9/11 hijackers, whoever they may really have been, and others.

The world is crawling with conspiracies of deep and dark political blood.  Those who attempt to deride those who recognize this by dismissively labeling them "conspiracy theorists" are largely foolishly closed of eye, apparently content to regard the world as some sort of fussy-wuzzy place that has evolved out of such barbarity, and into a place of bunnies and light.  This, of course, is a sad and very dangerous nonsense, but let me not digress too fully into discussions for another day.

The incontrovertible truth is that people conspire.  They do it all the time in countless places and ways, but always with the same fundamental goal of gaining some form of advantage for themselves.

That all said, we can turn our eyes to the so-called "globalist" or "internationalist".  Unlike in years past, since about 9/11/2001, the people of that political bent have been coming out of the closet, so to speak.  They no longer hide in shadows, but are content to declare themselves rather openly to the world.  They fully admit their desire, if not outright objective of one day seeing this earth of ours reigned over by a single-point governing body.  World dominion has, for many, become respectable in place of its prior reputation as the ultimate political evil.

The intentions and designs of the globalist/internationalist are fairly clear, at least in the broad and somewhat unrevealing strokes.  Proof of this is readily obtainable from the UN Agenda 21 Document, innocuously titled, "United Nations Conference on Environment & Development" under the auspices of the equally innocent sounding "United Nations Sustainable Development".  Therein one may find an eerie truth regarding the internationalist's mindset regarding his view of what I would call "lesser humanity".  And make no mistake about this point: the internationalist is fast to divide the race of humans into such categories.  Naturally, he is never himself to be considered as a member of the lesser set of his fellows.  No sir.  Somehow, he always manages to find himself in the subset whose blood line is not to be consumed in the flames of "population policy".

Just as an example of the truth of my assertions, subsection 5.3 begins by stating:

"The growth of world population and production combined with unsustainable consumption patterns places increasingly severe stress on the life-supporting capacities of our planet."

Taken uncritically, one might cheer for this statement.  After all, is it not a given that we are living beyond our means?  Well, isn't it?

The moment one begins to allow his proper habits of analytic thought to kick into gear, one's assessment of such a statement immediately comes to halts as the questions begin to assert themselves.  What is to be questioned, you ask?  Everything.  Every word.  Every sub-phrase, phrase, and then the gestalt of the sentence itself.

If we engage in such basic analytical activity, we come to the conclusion that the sentence in question is long on innuendo and very short on specifics, including facts.  For example, how do we know that our consumption is "unsustainable"?  What does "unsustainable" mean, specifically?  In what ways and for how long can we keep consuming "unsustainably"?  You will find the answers nowhere in the document in question.  Nowhere do we find any hard science on the "severe stress" claimed to be impinging upon the "life-supporting capacities of our planet".  And who says that the planet is ours?  As we can see, the tacit assumptions on which this one measly sentence rides are deep, several, and largely unquestioned by most people.

The section later states:

"Population policy should also recognize the role played by human beings in environmental and development concerns."

This sentence, when examined even in the most cursory manner, is perhaps even more disturbing.  What, exactly, is "population policy"?  Who makes it?  By what authority to do they presumably make it for all men?  What the standard of judgment?  By what authority is that the standard?  We could go on virtually endlessly with these sorts of questions.  Why?  Because none of them have satisfactory answers, which is to say non-arbitrary ones.

The implications of these two mere sentences are potentially vast.  Now consider that there are hundreds of pages of this nonsense, all of it speaking to the same few basic points that centrally include the one that says there are too many people on the planet and that we need to reduce the numbers.

Now ask yourself, "how?"  How are we to reduce our numbers?  More pointedly, how much are we to reduce them?  More pointedly still: in what time frame do we need to make this reduction?  This all leads to the endless squirm-inspiring query: "by what specific means shall we affect these reductions and upon whom shall they be visited?"

Once again, we must delve deeply into that question and its likely implications, though we will not do so here.  Suffice to say that the most likely scenario stands as some form of artificial cull of the population of men, worldwide.  What else could there be?  It took us so many thousands of years for our numbers to expand to their current levels.  It has been at least 150 years since the abrupt rise of human technologies made for the conditions that allowed for the equally abrupt rise in population.  Do we think that those numbers will simply come down as matters of will in but a few short years?

The opinions of the globalists is made clear that they believe we are "teetering" on the brink of destruction.  That almost certainly means that they believe we do not have another 150 years to bring down our numbers.  If they do, they are not saying it.  The question of time-frame seems to evade them rather conveniently, I might add, since I have yet to see anyone in a position of real power make any numerically definite statements regarding how long we have to save ourselves.

This leaves us looking at some potentially very unattractive possibilities.

Now, not to deny you the punchline, which I do not possess, we come to the reason for this apparent digression: the internationalist firmly believes in the absolute necessity of a one-world government.  They want the elimination of all sovereignty on the planet, whether it be states or individuals.  They make no bones about this today and are now very open on the matter.

What does this mean for America and how does it tie into the infantilization of its people?  Verily so: America is the only statistically significant national population that retains anything greater than the least shreds of their inborn freedom.  Our Bill of Rights (BoR) has thus far preserved us from total subjugation by those who deem themselves entitled to lord over us.

The rest of the world has been conquered.  Europe has had the tyrant's boot on its neck for so long that they are comfortable in their chains and have been trained to mostly willingness in compliance with the whims of their oppressors.  To an even greater degree, the same may be said for Asia and much of South America.  Africa remains a train wreck.  Canada is little more than a European political clone and Mexico has been a land of raving, raging political corruption since its first days.

That leaves America and Australia.  The people of Oz went for the internationalist bait of promising safety in exchange for arms.  Today, many Ozzies rue their flawed decision as their population remains disarmed almost in toto, rendering them helpless against any armed governing force, save to do as they are told.  Scratch them from the list of obstacles barring the way to One-World bliss.

That leaves America as the sole remaining impediment to global dominion.  And when I wrote "global dominion", it is not with visions of Dr. Evil in mind, laughing maniacally as he revels in his dastardly plans to bring the world to his heel.  Rather, we speak of men whose intentions may actually be at least ostensibly noble.  But as we should all know by now, intentions count for nothing in such matters, but only the results.

How does one defeat an impediment as mighty as the American?  Turn him away from his traditional strength and reduce him to... an effective infant!

There are other avenues to conquest, but this is clearly the best: to turn your potential foe against himself such that not only is he reduced to an impossibly low status, his condition is such that he becomes at worst an impotent opponent, but preferably a willing accomplice to your designs.

It seems to me that this is what has been foisted upon the people of America with great cunning, patience, and fortitude.  Looking at younger people today, the average man is weak and childish, those qualities being the readily predictable results of the ever intensifying effects of what I am sufficiently comfortable in labeling the "progressive agenda".

Thank heaven there are still millions of households, mostly in the rural areas, that have resisted the stupefying effects of contemporary American culture upon their issue.  Unfortunately, that still leaves a very large proportion of our people who have been purposely retarded in their thinking to the point they are not only incapable of critically assessing their circumstances, they have no interest.

I would note that there is actually very little needed in the way of positive action to cause such circumstances to come to realization.  A few key changes in the structure of the schools and an very long leash on the various commercial interests and nature will turn the ship of its own accord, bringing me to the third candidate theory: a hybrid of concerted political intent and the natural action of commercial ambition.  Entropy is loosed upon the people and the results are almost perfectly predictable.  It doesn't take much, which is why so many refuse to believe what is so clearly before them.

The take-away in all this?  I can think of nothing offhand other than the value of awareness.  That is the first step.  Become aware of what is going on around you and then decide whether that is what you want in your life and those of your children and the other people for whom you care.  After that, start thinking on what you might do to resist these effects, if resistance is what you choose.

Otherwise, crack a beer, get some popcorn, and return your attention to the television.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.