Wank of the weekend - Christopher Goodwin

As if we didn't have enough pseudo-intellectual wankers of our own, today the Sunday Times (£) "Kultchah" section has a cover story by this LA-based poser. He could, of course, be a transplant - he certainly sounds like a typical Brit journopuke.

It's a shame the article is behind a paywall, because I really can't be bothered to transcribe more than a few lowlights: 

For anyone over about 25 [1], movie-going has become an astonishingly dispiriting experience. . . . The inescapable truth is that American cinemas, one of the great cultural achievements of the 20th century [2], has reached a nadir. . . . The studios also point at least one finger of blame at adult audiences, who, they claim, simply don't go to the cinema as much as they once did [3] . . . . The British - whose cinemas, at least, can be relied on to screen worthwhile [4] indigenous films and the occasional subtitled hit from Europe and East Asia. Boxed first spread: In 1993 only 1 of the year's top 10 highest grossing movies was a kids' film; in 2009 it was 8 out of 10 [5]. Boxed second spread: an analysis of why middle budget films lose money [6]

1. Since the main thrust of the article is that the film-going public is now predominantly adolescent, it seems maturity takes a while to arrive in LA . . .
2. Clearly he meant cinema; as written it suggests that the tacky movie theatres were a great cultural achievement. But even going with what I think he meant, that is an astonishingly grandiose claim. 
3. Blame? It's called technological change, arsehole. No doubt music hall nostalgics once said the same about movies.
4. For which read state-subsidised.
5. D'you suppose it might be because kids' movies make money? Gosh, there's a thought.
6. D'you suppose that might explain why middle budget films are finding it difficult to attract commercial backing? Gosh, there's another thought.

Has the tide of cultural imperialism turned?

When grandees travelled to the provinces of the Roman Empire, they would observe with often ill-concealed scorn how the provincial elite did not just copy metropolitan fashions, but over-did it in their eagerness to show how up-to-date they were. So it has been with the American Empire, with the servile British leading Europe in the rush to embrace whatever pseudo-ideological fad the vast US academic establishment spewed forth, principally political correctness, eek!-o-freakery, and multiculturalism.

When the first British eek!-o-freaks started to get air-time, they even pronounced "pollution" in the American way (pol-oo-shun), and British academics fell over themselves to adopt PC and multi-culty verbiage, some in the hope of getting a much better-paying job in the States, the rest for the same reason the pseudo-ideologies swept through the American academy: they attracted new funding and gave birth to whole new departments.
 
Actually, it all started with the last significant example of reverse cultural imperialism, which was when the American humanities faculties uncritically adopted post-modernism, post-structuralism, and the technique of deconstruction drawn from the convoluted writings of the Jewish pied-noir Jacques Derrida.* Amplified back at Europe through the prism of American power and wealth, it took hold in a manner that it could never have achieved on the basis of its limited intellectual merits. 

Since the majority of academics are possessed of weak, furtive personalities, there was the additional attraction of being able to disguise their mediocrity with impenetrable verbiage, savagely and fairly satirised by the Postmodernism Generator, which produces a completely meaningless and randomly generated essay every time you click on it. Thus also the self-protective language of the other fads that swept across the Atlantic to be embraced by a European academy that abandoned self-respect in the rush to seem up-to-date.  

During the great, American-led economic boom of the twenty years up to 2006, universities over-expanded and faculties filled up with ever more conformist mediocrities, creating a declining spiral of quality and value for money that seems certain, now, to result in a higher education bust. The revelation that the economic boom itself had been in most respects a Ponzi scheme must lead to critical attention being brought to bear by governments, at last, on the poor returns obtained by pumping money into the higher education bubble.

I have previously gloated, more than enough I think, on the hissing sound as hot air leaks out of the climate catastrophist bubble. So it is with great pleasure that I can now gloat over the fact that German Chancellor  Angela Merkel has denounced multi-culturalism for the pernicious, ghettoising, and demoralising cult it has always been. I take further pleasure in underlining that the Merkel link is to a BBC report, since in Britain the Bitchy Boys have been the main multiculty evangelists.

Just a thought - but is it possible that all of this may relate to the fact that American-led liberal imperialism has failed so spectacularly in the Middle East, simultaneously with the failure of the US economy to emerge from the bust part of the last boom-and-bust cycle as quickly it has always done in the past? 

Watch this space. The Brits, of course, will be the last to desert the sinking ship. But if you look carefully, there are signs even in Westminster of doubts whether the "special relationship" is worth the candle. Can intellectual emancipation be far behind?

* Long before that, US sociologists copied not only the ideas but even the badly translated terminology of German exemplars, which has been a stone around the neck of that particular pseudo-science ever since.

Is this really the kind of country we want to live in?

Thus the last sentence of a Guardian article by Ian Birrell, the father of a child with profound learning difficulties, detailing what he calls a "whirlwind of hatred against the disabled".

For three days a gang of 18-year-olds tortured a younger autistic boy. They kicked him, stamped on his head, scraped his skin with sandpaper, pelted him with dog shit, forced him to drink alcohol until he passed out and stuck tape to his genitals. The thugs laughed as they filmed themselves abusing their terrified victim, who can be heard whimpering for mercy. . . And why did they carry out these vile assaults? Simply because they were bored, they told a court this week. . . . The three assailants were given just 80 hours' unpaid community work and a three-month curfew. No signing of the sex offenders register, despite the sexual overtones to the attack. No jail sentence. No justice.

If only it were hatred. That, our police and courts are fully geared up to deal with - Birrell says that over the past year there have been 11,264 prosecutions for "racial and religious crime". But it's not. It is simply primitive cruelty, perpetrated by feral youths who have no fear of the law or respect for the most basic concepts of human decency. We did not import this garbage - it's entirely made in Britain.

My observations are necessarily anecdotal, limited as they are to what I saw on the streets of Cambridge, and see now in a quiet provincial market town, on public transport and on occasional visits to London. But in the eleven years I have been back in this country, the only repugnant - when not also menacing - behaviour I have observed has been by young white people, including parents with small children.

No sane person would want to live in a country where such behaviour goes unchecked. But that simply begs the far bigger questions of what - if anything - can be done to instill respect for others in a society where the cultural elite sneers at decency and exalts "transgressive" exhibitionism.  

Labour's solution was to flood the country with "new blood", believing that the white "underclass" is some kind of unsalvageable genetic cesspool. Fabian socialism and eugenics are inextricably interwoven, but it has been profoundly shocking to see its principles applied in a country that once fought to the death against racialism.   

The utter bankruptcy of the policy is daily being proved as the same pathology is revealed in descendants of people who came to Britain seeking a better life. It's not in their genes - it's in our culture.

Witty niquers protest

Against the burka (niqab) ban in France. What would be really amusing would be to do it in Tehran.

Go for it, girls!

The British suck - says a Brit

In a good article in Standpoint about the imminent demise of the British Film Council, consisting largely of a long quote from Oscar-winning Julian Fellowes, Peter Whittle concludes:

The travails of the UK film industry (as with so many of our problems) are always described in terms of lack of money. Proper support would open the dam which currently holds back the talent that would otherwise be gushing through. But I am not convinced by this endless boosterism. Having reviewed movies in one form or another for nearly twenty years, I have sat through more than my fair share of simply terrible British films, which in their crassness, amateurism and ineptitude leave one depressed and (like audiences at local multiplexes) heading straight for the nearest Hollywood blockbuster.

In other words I am not so sure that there are such great reserves of talent there, waiting to be tapped. If you think this is too harsh, just watch Sex Lives of the Potato Men. It is not so much about the money as the culture, and ours right now is downwardly aspirational, often nihilistic and polarised between the morbidly miserablist and the sexed-up nostalgic. No amount of financial support will alter this.

Our culture, what's left of it

Title of Theodore Dalrymple's collection of essays, sub-titled "The Mandarins and the Masses", first published in 2005. See author's interview here. Key passage:

My father was a communist though he was also a businessman. Our house was full of communist literature from the 1930s and 40s, and I remember such authors as Plekhanov and Maurice Hindus and Edgar Snow. It was always clear that my father's concern for humanity was not always matched by his concern for men, to put it mildly, for whom (as individuals) he often expressed contempt. He found it difficult to enter an equal relationship with anyone, and preferred to play Stalin to their Molotov. I think the great disjunction between my father's expressed ideas (and ideals) and his everyday conduct affected me, and made me suspicious of people with grand schemes of universal improvement.

I missed the book when it came out (being somewhat preoccupied with cancer), will buy it now.