I had thought the floodwaters of Texas had at least momentarily submerged the left's war on history. But I see a Hillary Clinton staffer called Logan Anderson has been triggered by a white man with a Confederate flag on his boat rescuing black people in Houston.
At one time, this would have been a heartwarming story - like the Brits and the Krauts playing footie in no man's land at Christmas 1914. Why, look! Houston's oldest surviving Confederate general is recognizing our shared humanity by taking his boat to rescue the children of his former plantation slaves! But we live in a sterner age, and the appropriate response to an offer of rescue from a vessel flying the Stars & Bars is to riddle it below the waterline and dispatch its cap'n to Johnny Reb's Locker.
Elsewhere, the cultural hurricane swirls on. In Memphis, Gone with the Wind is gone with the winds of change buffeting the American inheritance. WREG-TV reports:
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — "Gone With the Wind" will be gone from The Orpheum's summer movie series, the theater's board said Friday.
The Orpheum Theatre Group decided not to include the 1939 movie about a plantation in the Civil War-era South in its 2018 Summer Movie Series after feedback from patrons following the last screening Aug. 11.
"As an organization whose stated mission is to 'entertain, educate and enlighten the communities it serves', the Orpheum cannot show a film that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population," the theater's operators said in a statement.
As Scarlett O'Hara presciently observed, tomorrow is another day. Indeed, today is the only day - Pol Pot's Year Zero as Bill Murray's Groundhog Day. Upon taking office, Justin Trudeau justified each bit of twerpy modish folderol with the words "Because it's 2015." Why have a "gender-balanced cabinet"? Because it's 2015! Around the toppled statuary of Durham and Baltimore and West Palm Beach, the mob is taking it to the next level: "Because it's 2017", and anything that came before must be destroyed.
Totalitarianism is a young man's game. The callow revolutionaries like to crow that their enemies are all "old white men" who'll be dead soon, after which youthful idealism will inherit the earth. And it's true that the surviving German Nazis are all getting a bit long in the tooth. But they were young once, and bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. And to be young was very heaven: in the early Thirties the Nazis were the smooth-visaged lads gleefully torching books in the streets. They were the future, and these elderly monarchists and middle-aged democrats, queasy about the torching of the non-ideologically-compliant past, would all be dead soon enough. As the blond Aryan boy sings in Bob Fosse's film of Cabaret:
Oh fatherland, fatherland, show us the sign
Your children have waited to see
The morning will come when the world is mine
Tomorrow Belongs to Me!
Ah, but who watches Cabaret in 2017, never mind Gone with the Wind? From The New York Post comes an arresting headline - "Millennials Don't Really Care About Classic Movies":
A new study finds that less than a quarter of millennials have watched a film from start to finish that was made back in the 1940s or 50s and only a third have seen one from the 1960s.
Thirty percent of young people also admit to never having watched a black and white film all the way through – as opposed to 85 percent of those over 50 – with 20 percent branding the films "boring."
My distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle remarks:
This is literally the cause of all our problems.
She means it:
You can learn almost everything about life from movies... You will learn, for example, that you are not the first generation to have Problem X or "Solution" Y... Oh, hey, this black and white thing with the stupid title [Goodbye, My Fancy] actually has a "free speech on campus" subplot...
But you can only learn "almost everything about life" if you stumble across movies. Very few people seek out Goodbye, My Fancy (1951). For the ensuing third of a century, it was the sort of thing that would turn up on the Late Show when you weren't quite ready to call it a night - or on a rainy afternoon when you were overly familiar with that day's "Leave It to Beaver" rerun and weren't in the mood for Merv Griffin. Now we live in an age where the haphazard rewards of "stumbling across" have been entirely eliminated: You programme your own tastes on your own device, and you can live within those constraints 24/7.
The appeal of "old" stories used to be that their truths were so enduring you didn't mind the crinolines and powdered wigs: When I read bedtime stories to my little girl - Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, Black Beauty - she did not have an adult's conception of time and so was too young to know or to care that all these people lived years before she was born and were all now dead. She was simply engaged by their quandaries. The endurance of Shakespeare is, as the cliché has it, that he "understands human nature" and so you cut him some slack on the doublet and hose.
But the hyper-present-tense of our own culture has more or less inverted that: We don't mind the doublet and hose, it's the "human nature" that's the problem. So, when today's movies do the period stuff, we impose our values on their times - hence, all the "f*cks" and lesbo sub-plots in recent Miss Marples, or the ghastly boorishness of Robert Downey Jr's outings as Sherlock Holmes. Their times, our values. And because we are, in fact, engaged in overthrowing and remaking "human nature", the past's eternal verities are a particular affront.
It would be foolish to think that contempt can be contained merely to electronic entertainments. Today we insist "empathy" is a virtue, and trumpet our own incessantly. As I note in my bestselling After America (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore):
In contemporary education's flight from facts to feelings, 'empathy"'has become a useful substitute for reality. In the schoolrooms of America, you'll be asked to empathize with, say, a West African who's sold into slavery and shipped off to Virginia, or a loyal Japanese-American in a World War Two internment camp, or a hapless Native American who catches dysentery, typhoid, gonorrhea and an early strain of avian flu by foolishly buying beads from Christopher Columbus. This would be a useful exercise if we were genuinely interested in socio-historical empathizing. But instead the compliant pupil is expected merely to acknowledge the unlucky Indian as an early victim of European racism, and to assign the slave a contemporary African-American identity and thereby 'empathize' with his sense of injustice. At this level, empathy is no more than the projection of contemporary and parochial obsessions—racism, sexism, imperialism—over the rich canvas of the past and the other.
The more we boast of our "empathy", the less we have - not in the sense of the definition offered by David Berger in his book Clinical Empathy:
The capacity to know emotionally what another is experiencing from within the frame of reference of that other person.
My emphasis. Not a lot of that in the bright new dawn of our statue-free land. In an empathy-flaunting age we demand the entirety of human history think just like us - "because it's 2017". Robert E Lee must be toppled because he was racist. Thomas Jefferson must come down because he owned slaves. Christopher Columbus has to go because he had no transgender-bathroom policy on the Niña, Pinta and Santa MarĂa. The mobs in the street have no idea who these guys are - except that they are not like them, and so cannot be permitted to stand.
I've said many times that, when a people lose their future, they also lose their past: There will be no West End theatre in an Islamized London - no Oscar Wilde, no Bernard Shaw, no Noël Coward, and eventually no Shakespeare. There will be no Berlin Philharmonic in an Islamized Germany - no Brahms, Beethoven, Bruckner. There will be no classic rock on the radio dial in an Hispanic Florida - so no Motorhead, no Def Leppard, no Blue Oyster Cult. Such are the vicissitudes of demographic transformation.
But perhaps it won't matter anyway. Our age not only disdains its inheritance, but actively reviles it, and wishes to destroy it. It is a totalitarian impulse. Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit id est semper esse puerum: To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child. To despise what happened before you were born is to remain forever a juvenile delinquent in the thuggish gang of the present tense.
~If you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club, feel free to comment away - especially if you've seen Goodbye, My Fancy. If you're not a member but you'd like to be, you can sign up for a full year, or, lest you suspect a dubious scam by a fly-by-night shyster, merely a quarter. And don't forget our new gift membership for a friend or loved one. Among the other benefits of membership is our series of audio adventures, Tales for Our Time. A brand new serialization starts this Friday. Warning to younger members: it's like totally old. For more on The Mark Steyn Club, please see here.
Comment on this item (members only)
Submission of reader comments is restricted to Mark Steyn Club members only. If you are not yet a member, please click here to join. If you are already a member, please log in here:
Member Login
51 Member Comments
As relations between the two countries began to warm, Arthur Miller was invited to the People's Republic of China to direct a Chinese language version of "Death of a Salesman." The question he was asked, continually, was, "How could you write a play that is so quintessentially Chinese?" I'm pretty sure he did not answer, "Because it's 1983."
Good stuff, as always. I think the desire to tear things down (statues, rules, history) is also driven by the simple glee of destruction and power. The destroyers hide behind a "cause", which delays or prevents prosecution or retribution. This is why their demands and statements make no sense -- they don't have to, they are just a cover.
Excellent point - just one of the many - about stumbling on "new" old movies.
As you said, we capture our own tastes on our devices, and understand and think about only what we've decided we want to understand and think about. We do the same with news and opinion (is there a difference these days?). Not sure how you'd do it, but someone ought to do a study to determine how much this atrophies the brain - ha!
Maybe internet "browsers" should be called "locators". To use one, you have to know what you're looking for before you start looking. You don't really browse, as you would the bookshelves of a library or bookstore. Or the late-night-theater television with a good, old fashioned, three button remote.
My observation on a good old movie, not a great movie, but a good movie that may cause a tear at its conclusion.
I mentioned to a journalist friend of mine that everyone in his "profession" should watch "Roman Holiday" for a different perspective on journalist ethics. It's a fun movie and in the end the journalists do not publish a story because they do ultimately respect the privacy of "her highness", played by Audrey Hepburn. My friend couldn't believe that someone wouldn't publish a National Enquirer'esque type story if they had the "goods" on someone. It's also an interesting comment on social change since this is the movie where Audrey gets her hair cut on camera, changing from a classic long haired woman to a butch cut girl. I wish this was mandatory watching for anyone to qualify for a degree in the "profession".
That final paragraph is one of the best things I've ever read.
"The Totalitarianism of the Now" is a masterpiece, Mark -- yet another! I hope it gets a wide readership. The preservation of our historical memory is truly one of the great issues of our age.
I eschewed Downey as Holmes too, but to see Margaret Rutherford carry on about hot lesbian sex, well, I might tune in for a laugh. and I bet Margaret Rutherford could make it interesting.
"The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see."
- Winston Churchill
In the UK a story appeared about a Muslim foster mum taking in a Christian child.
The BBC press website did not report on this story, but added three lines about the story then presented a story about a Muslim foster mum who took in lots of different children with success. So the controversial story was replaced with a happy story, the BBC are reframing the immediate history in front of our eyes.
"If a child wants a bacon sandwich, we would say you can't have that in this house but we can take you to a restaurant where you can have one. {bbc.co.uk aug2017}
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41085638
As an aside. I don't think I've ever seen a comments section where so many people use their real names. 'Tis good.
Your excellent observation is NOT a small thing. Being unafraid to use one's real name, in this day and age is no a small thing at all.
Well for me, Mark's comment sections amount to my "safe space" for saying what I actually think. The thing I admire the most about Mark Steyn is that he has the guts to stand up to the mob and speak real truth to fake power as it were. My myself personally, I'm not up to the task.
Well-said, as usual, Mark.
However I tend to disagree with the lumping of Hispanics in Miami with Muslims in Europe, in terms of their cultural tyrannies once they hit a certain majority percentage of the population. I've seen too many punk-rock latino kids to believe that Hispanic culture in the US is that monolithic. It strikes me that Latin Americans are much more able to assimilate into Anglo culture than Muslims are to Western culture.
Thanks Mr. Mumford, I appreciate the civilizational thumbs up.
That is a significant distinction, and one worth mentioning. But I think the overall point that the original culture is ultimately transformed beyond recognition is still meaningful. Latino-Hispanic culture will commingle far better with Anglo-American culture than will any currently Islamic culture. And that exposes the problem with our understanding of Islam. Islam is far more than a religion. It is a religion, a culture, a political system and a way of life all inseparably rolled into one.
I came to take in Mark's latest episode of civilizational collapse, and stayed for the acid wit and fine writing. Of course, you could approach it the other way round and still enjoy it just the same. One of his best entries among a long list of great ones.
I find your screeds to be more dark over the past few weeks...
It has become harder to cover up the turn of events with humor.
Just to name one issue, we have a violent street army beating up people for no other purpose than anarchy. The man in a coma right now in Berkeley was on his way to the grocery store when antifa attacked him... He wasn't even at the rally when he was attacked. A sound man from a local station, black, covered his body to stop the beating. I wish I knew who that man was. This gives me hope.
And the vast public out in TV land can't help but be disgusted by this.
"What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want it? NOW"
I think the worm is going to turn here because the vast number of reasonable people will see this for what it is.
Babs,
Here is a link to the Breitbart story. http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/08/29/liberal-journalist-shields-man-from-antifa-attackers-i-thought-they-were-going-to-kill-him/
We normals are staying at home because the media have successfully painted everyone marching as a Nazi or a defender of the world. I don't think that will last much longer. There are areas of the country where that pedestrian would be armed and be right to defend himself. The situation will then explode.
The ending of "No Go Zones" after Raheem Kassam has documented the penetration of the Immigrant Unenlightened People into the Countries of Great Britain; Sweden; Denmark; Germany; France; Belgium and America and establishing a Separate Culture is still possible in the U.S.A. in Mr. Kassam's opinion.
He explains clearly the problem with the American situation is still solvable, but will take time. However to avoid the inevitable bloodshed and possible Civil War in each of the Named European requires immediate action by the Left of the American Political Arena.
The possibility of stopping the incursion is almost totally in the hands of the Ordinary American Citizen who support the Democrat Party with their Votes. The moribund Democrat Party is a Hulk of aged, well past their effective abilities as Leadership. The Democrat Party's credibility is now such they are losing their supporters from every possible electoral group.
Treating the Black Community, especially in the Urban inner city as unenlightened and aware People is similar to how the Muslim Theocracy of the Middle-East (-{known as the Near-East--- by the mummified United States of America; Department of State)-- has treated and suppressed Enlightenment knowledge through Rote Memorization of Cult readings and Religious Dogma
The revolving door culture between the Ivy League Madrasses of the less involved and guilted because of their weaknesses as individuals during the Sixties/Seventies -- Civil Rights/Government Confrontations -- now bring their messages of Cult readings and Dogma to and from the Bureaucracies of the Department of State & Ivy League Administrations.
Reading No Go Zones will not be an exercise in expanding the cleverness of discussion abilities in both Department of State and the Ivy League Universities; because it is documentation of the ignorance and cruelty which has been brought down on the Ordinary Citizens of Europe.
Only the Numbed Supporters of the Democrat Party can prevent the ignorance and cruelty of the Unenlightened Immigrant penetration into The U.S.A.
Hopefully such awareness in the American side of the World's "presently" Longest Undefended Border; will motivate the similarly moribund supporters of the Majority Government of the Liberal Party of Government before the No Go Zones are expanded into Canada.
Soon there will be no chance of 'stumbling across' old movies or old stories. Media platforms that can actually deliver a story are disappearing. Newspapers, magazines, and printed non-fiction books are just about dead. Even desktop computers with large screens are becoming a rarity. Everything now is supposed to fit on a 5" iphone screen. Many popular news and opinion websites are now so 'mobile friendly' that they convey almost no useful info at all. I fear our grandkids are going to be the dumbest and most gullible generation in history. They will be easy pickings.
And of course it was done before by Lysenko in Stalinist Russia. Biology will be increasingly where the battle lines are.
Regarding 'remaking "human nature"' - Jordan Peterson said something that will tell you what is coming next: "They are coming for the biologists next" ("they" = radical left). Biology ("nature") is an inconvenience for the left and its theories of social construction of human attributes, and so it must be attacked. The current nonsense about the social construction of gender is just the start. Actually, it has been going on for quite some time now. Neo-Marxists make up a not insignificant minority of evolutionary biologists, who have been trying for decades to reshape evolutionary theory in a Marxist mould. Steven Jay Gould was an early famous example. Today we have neo-Marxist biologists dreaming up theories about human development that fuzzes nature and nurture into a single thing that is infinitely plastic. This is the application of "dialectical materialism" to biology, and its aim is to remove from discussion anything smacking of an innate human nature (to say nothing of male and female nature). Just watch, the foot soldiers have been sharpening their ideological tools for decades now, and pretty soon they will be going after all of biology, not just sexual identity. Expect to see some crazy stuff happening in medicine (and attendant disasters) for instance.
Reading this comment reminded me of a some words in a Greg Egan SF work called "Distress". (From memory) the line was something like "the great battles in this century are going to be about the 2 H words - Health and Humanity".
I think that in the last couple of years, this is certainly coming true - gender and sexual identity are ground zero for in the debate about what is "healthy" or not. And although I think Egan was talking more about biological and genetic changes when referring to Humanity, the rise of identity politics has given rise to a far more chilling prospect - that your "humanity" can be voided merely by attaching a label to you. In other words, if I call you a racist / sexist / homophobe, I don't have to deal with you as a person - it's perfectly OK to treat you as less than human.
I was thinking the same thing last night, Mark, as I was helping my daughter (14yo) doing her homework. The question was (on Rebecca) "Why is it worth reading a book as old as one written in 1938?" She wasn't sure - her classmates reckon it's too old. I suggested other "old" books were worthwhile (like, say, the Bible) because they had something to say about being human, and that hasn't changed for thousands of years.
What the heck are they teaching our kids?
Overall agreement. I'm a thinking Mark is profoundly correct about the plumbing on the Santa Maria; I'm just not as sure as Mark is about either the Niña or the Pinta ....
Mark Steyn makes me wish I were smarter.
Agreed. Without him, I would be a lot stupider.
Dear Mark,
This essay may rank among the very best that I have read of your exceptional work. Flows well, just the right amount of mid-twentieth century pop-culture, and a ginormous "why does this thought matter?" reveal in the last two paragraphs.
Well done, keep 'em coming.
Stay on the wall!
"The capacity to know emotionally what another person is experiencing from within the frame of reference of that other person" illustrated, as a song of the week candidate -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnS9M03F-fA
Liberals used to "get" this, at least in the arts. Now for the reasons you give, all is politics so all is ashes, and the Other cannot be allowed to be human...
leftists - perpetual nihilistic Jr. High bullies who MUST destroy you if you do not worship at the alter of their self righteousness.
Mark, I think you should have included the next part of Marcus Tullius Cicero's quote: For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?
Meanwhile, "Judge dismisses Sarah Palin's lawsuit against New York Times". Apparently the NYT has the Staples' That Was Easy button and Steyn doesn't.
I believe at some level these acts of historical vandalism are stage three of the cultural retconning of our history. Previously, if you were to visit some federal monument the founding fathers would be "contextualized" that is the characteristics which suited modern tastes, emphasized, those did not "problematized" with suitable commentary. See the black lady in the Ken Burns series the Civil war. This had at least the quality of not simply re-inventing the relevant history. Lo and behold I venture into Grant's Tomb in 2017 to find out that there were 700 transgendered civil war soldiers. A fake past concocted to justify the regime's claims using a fake historical patina. In a similar vein Alexander Hamilton goes from reactionary Scotsman to honorary non-white. Now as we approach 2018, it looks as though any reference to the past is a unwelcome reminder of the great swathe of human virtues and civilizational values fundamentally heretical to the state ideology. Better to tear any public tokens of these lost history down lest the public be reminded that the current year is after all only a moment in the never-ending tide of history and this regime like the rest of them will too one day belong to the past (hopefully sooner rather than later).
There is hope. In my large extended family, The Bishops Wife, It's a Wonderful Life and The Philadelphia Story are in high regard and required watching. Motown, old Springsteen, The Eagles and Linda Ronstadt are overheard through closed doors at parties where the oldest is 27.
Very, very, very depressing!!
Brilliant as usual, Mark, but just one thing--the captain isn't flying the Stars and Bars, which was the first national flag of the Confederacy, but the Confederate Navy Jack. The same design when square in shape rather than rectangular was the battle flag.
Your title is better, but an alternative would have been "The Totalitarianism of the Narcissists." To know history is to have a certain humility and gratitude for past generations that achieved so much while facing hardships we never will. Today's left views itself as the culmination of history -- smarter, purer, finer than all who came before.
I don't know Mark; the Latin you used to describe the new thugs so clearly is probably next on the list of political taboos to be removed forcefully. The language of slavers and empire builders, you know...
When something that was once taboo becomes acceptable to many--gay marriage, for example--all opposition becomes instantly taboo. Observant Christian bakers and florists be damned; they will pay for clinging to their religion. (Muslim bakers who also refuse to cater gay weddings, as filmed by Steven Crowder, are excused.) Even something as recently unthinkable as transgendered people in the military--unthinkable because literally no one ever thought of the idea--has become a cause célèbre among the more militaristic social justice warriors. I have no problem with gay marriage, as long as people who do have a problem with it are not pilloried in the public square. I have no problem with transgendered people serving in the military, as long as they perform their assigned duties, and as long as people who do have a problem with it are not lined up and shot. I will concede certain "rights", however recently discovered, as long as other, longer-standing, rights are not consequently erased from the books.
Joshua,
What you have to understand is the totalitarian principle; Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.
And the corollary:
Everything is subject to change, depending on the whimsy of those wielding the power. And you WILL accept the change.
Celebrate diversity! OR ELSE.
Beautiful! "Junvenile delinquent in the thuggish gang of the present tense." So true. And the thugs are so thought free that their idea of an intelligent response is to barf out a few propaganda slogans; or even less work, a few insults and vulgarities.
The disinterest younger generations have for older movies and their focus on empathy are two separate problems, but both are rooted in the shallowness of these people. Older movies are boring because they do not feature enough explosions, sex and special effects to keep the kids interested. The phenomenon is not limited to older movies. Great story telling and skilled acting are not enough for the younger set; you have to keep them visually/sexually stimulated. Empathy and the insistence on imposing one's own values on historical figures demonstrate an inability to contextualize events in the era in which they occurred. This also demonstrates shallowness. But there is another problem when it comes to empathy as practiced by the Left, it is completely selective. We are required to empathize with the African slave sold to European traders and shipped off to America. At the same time we are prohibited from empathizing with the poor southern farmer who saw his home being invaded by the Union Army. Implicit in both is the assumption that both the African slave and the southern farmer must be judged from the perspective of present values. Much of the disorder in the World today can be traced back to simple shallowness of our younger generations and sadly of our leaders.
No Motorhead? NO MOTORHEAD?!?!
That's does it. This means WAR!
No Sleep til Hammersmith, baby! \m/ \m/
Jason,
Sadly, I can report from South Florida that there is already a dearth of classic rock and roll on terrestrial radio. On the other hand, you have your choice of multiple stations playing Latin music, and I don't mean Gregorian Chant. Thank goodness for satellite radio.
Ah yes, it seems that altogether too many of our younger generation long for employment by the Ministry of Truth or the Thought Police. Eric Blair is twisting in his grave.
The Left thinks Blair/Orwell wrote how-to books.
Wow, thanks!
And yeah, I "work" with TCM in the background -- actually, the "off-to-the-right-of-me-ground" -- so I'm in a rare position, able to "stumble upon" stuff.
Like, say, 1934's "Gentlemen are Born," with recent grads complaining that their aren't any jobs waiting for them and the world's going to heck, so college was a waste of time.
:-)
Kathy, I've read enough of your wonderful writing to use your first name. Please know that there are many people you've never heard of (like me) who miss your regular columns terribly from another web site I won't mention here. You are a gem.
Hear, hear!! :-)
While we are in praise mode, I thought KS's review of the King of Comedy (which I haven't seen) astonishing.
Gem! Seconded.