On the way to work a week or two ago I was passed by a Prius with a bumper sticker that said SIMPLIFY. It made me chuckle, because if there is one thing a Prius is not, it’s simple. There’s a huge disconnect between the pastoral imagery of sophisticated advertising directing us to be more “green” and the sophisticated technology much of it is pushing. I don’t say the technology won’t deliver–maybe it will and maybe it won’t–but it is quite the opposite of a back-to-the-land impulse, in which very few people are seriously interested.
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Perhaps you’ve heard about this disgusting bit of climate-change propaganda. Let me describe it before you click on that link, because it’s really a little disturbing: it portrays schoolchildren and others being given a pep talk about doing something to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and then being asked whether they intend to participate. Those who say no are blown to bits, very graphically. It’s meant to be funny, but the almost universal reaction has been that it’s just repulsive and perhaps a bit scary.
One thing about it that hasn’t been mentioned very often, though, is the assumption that the school has the right and probably the responsibility to preach environmental activism. I always knew that the expulsion of Christianity from American schools would not mean that there would be no moral teaching there, only that it would come from a different world-view.
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I’ve often thought that the movie Bonnie and Clyde marked an important shift in our culture, a shift which was mainly for the worse. Here is a leftist making my point for me, and more:
My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left, much more important than anything written by Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills or Regis Debray. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate [sic] how strange and fresh that was.
Of course sometimes the outlaws are the good guys, etc. But to erect that as a cultural dogma is sick. I remember how startling Bonnie and Clyde was–I was a college freshman at the time. You can expect a lot more on this topic in my memoir.
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Speaking of leftists, I am astonished to find myself in agreement with Katrina vanden Heuvul that we need to stop calling each other Nazis. It doesn’t seem like much to ask, but it probably won’t happen.
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I think this was the funniest title for a blog post that I’ve run across in the past week or so: “They will know we are traddies by our love“. The target is radical traditionalist Catholics, and the author considers himself more or less one of them, but recognizes that they do often come across as hostile. Several commenters make the point that they have good reason to be hostile, and that’s true: one thing that really struck me as a new Catholic ca. 1980 was the contempt which was heaped on traditionalists by progressives (modernists, whatever you want to call them).
Light On Dark Water 
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