Sunday, October 14, 2012

Where Did All The Counterculture People Go?

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson has a must-read piece about 90days90reasons.com, a website created to allow counterculture artists and musicians to post reasons to re-elect Barack Obama. After appropriately girding my loins* for what I might find, I popped over to 90days and tried one of them out. In an essay entitled Because The Republican Party Is Pre-Galilean, Ishmael Reed gets out of the starting blocks with this:
We have to re-elect President Obama because the country can’t be turned over to people who are anti-Science, anti-Intellectual, and who deny facts and evidence.
The remainder of the essay reads like the rantings of someone who has been locked in a Progressive Re-education Camp for a decade or two. Which he may well have been, considering how utterly saturated the art community is with progressives. So thank you and good night. That's the limit of how far I'm willing to go into the swamp. There's not enough loin-girding in the world to warrant further study. Enter that site at your own risk.

Andrew was far braver and plumbed the depths of the bog, coming up with this summary:
For the counterestablishmentarians, “program” and “funding” are words with talismanic power. President Obama will “fund programs” or “not cut programs” that will rescue the environment or curb domestic violence or teach civility or help the disabled or train the jobless. The proper program can do everything but play canasta. And it can be advocated without wondering how it might work or whether it would work or what other programs would not be funded so it could be.
And that struck me as particularly sad. The progressive, counterculture movement has been reduced to a group of children begging not to be forced to move out of the house no matter how old they get. Whatever the problem is, they want a government solution. A program, a committee, a plan, something. They want to be left alone to satiate their bodily desires while some Cross-Competency Product Team with a Charter, Program Plan, Budget and Milestones and Objectives takes care of everything larger than singing songs, smoking weed and getting laid.

Here you go. Here's what the current Vanguard of the Proletariat is fighting for. Here's why they march, sing songs, write 90 Reasons and chant slogans.

It's pathetic. The progressive counterculture has regressed back into infancy where they don't need to know how or if things work. They just want the icky, adult things to be taken care of by the government while they go explore their bodies.

In case you were wondering how it all ends when the progressives win, take a look at Greece and Spain.

* - Ungirded loins are a risk I'm not willing to take!

1 comment:

tim eisele said...

"considering how utterly saturated the art community is with progressives."

This is something I've often wondered about: why would the art community be like this? Why aren't more conservatives, libertarians, etc. making a name for themselves as artists?