Ch 12.2 - Culture/Art/Literature

“The most counter culture thing you can do is be a Christian." - Unknown

a. Culture
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"If you're out to destroy good you have to have a comparison point. You have to have something that was once good so you know the difference. They give you a taste. It can't be destroyed unless you are given a taste of it. It can't be all bad or it can't accomplish it's main goal." - Quantum of Conscience

"We've gone from Norman Rockwell's America to Hugh Hefner's America." - Unknown

“Life is a strip club.” - Unknown, on black music videos

"What women have done to comics and video games, men should do to Lifetime movies. Be like 'all my life I've been a fan of Lifetime movies. Directing one has always been my dream' and then make a movie about women with giant tits fighting aliens in Napoleonic Europe." - @futureusrefugee

"Life is beautiful. It's the system that's ugly." - Unknown

"When you're born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front row seat." - George Carlin, Nov 12, 2016

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.” - Neil Postman – Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities, and commercials.” - Neil Postman – Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe.” - Frederic Bastiat

"Civilization depends on people doing the right thing, even when nobody is looking. Obviously, some of these people didn't get the memo. If you want civilization and the rule of law, you are going to have to take enforcement of property rights a lot more seriously. Stealing cattle and horses used to be a hanging offense." - Unknown

"I’m so glad that young white people are finally grappling with this embarrassing topic. I mean, if it weren’t for Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Hippocrates, Thucydides, Herodotus, Euclid, Plutarch, Josephus, Ptolemy, Cato, Terence, Catullus, Cicero, Caesar, Sallust, Virgil, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Seneca, Petronius, Pliny the uncle, Pliny the nephew, Martial, Suetonius, Tacitus, Marcus Aurelius, Paul of Tarsus, Augustine, Tertullian, Boethius, Bede, Eusebius, Galen, Machaut, Dufay, van Eyck, van der Weyden, Ockeghem, Aquinas, Giotto, Chaucer, Hildegard, Donatello, Bosch, Durer, Gutenberg, Luther, Zwingli, Hus, Calvin, Erasmus, Montaigne, Rabelais, Tallis, Palestrina, Dowland, Monteverdi, Dante, Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Spinoza, Cervantes, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Titian, Gentileschi, Veronese, Josquin, Shakespeare, Spenser, Newton, Marlowe, Milton, Donne, Dryden, Descartes, Pascal, Rembrandt, El Greco, Velázquez, Vermeer, Caravaggio, Bernini, Rubens, Corneille, Molière, Racine, Harvey, Lavoisier, Defoe, Montesquieu, Purcell, Bach, Pachelbel, Hogarth, Telemann, Handel, Haydn, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Burke, Smith, Kant, Boucher, Watteau, Fragonard, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Gibbon, David, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Hegel, Mill, Comte, Jenner, Goethe, Schiller, Byron, Blake, Tennyson, Austen, Keats, Coleridge, Shelley, Shelley, Browning, Browning, Brontë, Brontë, Brontë, Hugo, Eliot, Wordsworth, Pushkin, Gogol, Chekov, Turgenev, Darwin, Turner, Renoir, Monet, Manet, Degas, Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, Dickenson, Hawthorne, Poe, Flaubert, Stendahl, Balzac, Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Brahms, Wagner, Liszt, Mussorgsky, Dvořák, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Zola, Kierkegaard, van Gogh, Whistler, Seurat, Cézanne, Gauguin, Rousseau, Bruckner, Mahler, Verdi, Puccini, Ibsen, Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, Ford, Koch, Pasteur, Lister, Freud, Curie, Curie, Roentgen, Twain, Stevenson, Hardy, Crane, Hopkins, Yeats, Whitman (who hardly counts since he was gay), Tchaikovsky (who hardly counts since he was gay), Wilde (who hardly counts since he was gay), Cather (who hardly counts since she was gay), Gide (who hardly counts since he was gay), Proust (who hardly counts since he was gay), Copland (who hardly counts since he was gay), Auden (who hardly counts since he was gay), Britten (who hardly counts since he was gay), Williams (who hardly counts since he was gay), Woolf, Tolkien, Conrad, Huxley, Orwell, O’Neill, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Duchamp, Kandinsky, de Chirico, O’Keefe, Nabokov, Marquez, Llosa, Borges, Paz, Neruda, Faulkner, James, Conrad, Wharton, London, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Lewis, Buck, Bellow, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Plath, Hughes, Frost, Lawrence, Christie, Sayers, James, Stravinsky, Nijinsky, Balanchine, Debussy, Ravel, Bartók, Hindemith, ProkofieShostakovich, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, Miro, Modigliani, Mondrian, Kahlo, Klimt, Dali, Rodin, Brancusi, Hopper, Rothko, Bohr, Planck, Einstein, Fermi, Whitehead, Russell, Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, Weil, O’Connor, Brecht, Kafka, Fleming, Salk&Sabin, Watson&Crick, Kerouac, Vonnegut, Updike, Pynchon, Ballard, Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, le Guin, McCarthy, Pollock, Rauschenberg, Diebenkorn, and de Kooning, .....white people would have no culture at all." - Unknown

"You can only lose the culture war. The only possible reversal must come from strategy rather than struggle. The standard color coding of the culture war is tedious. Let's get Tolkein-pilled and talk not about red and blue but hobbits and elves. While remembering thatfor two centuries before 1980, red - the color of anger- was the color of the left. We know who the hobbits are and who the elves are. We know who is on top and who is on the bottom. Of dwarves and orcs, we shall not speak. We know what the elves want: they want to live beautiful lives. We know what the hobbits want: grill and raise kids. Dear hobbits: you can only lose the culture war. Even when elves use political power to impose elf culture on you, you cannot use political power to impose hobbit culture on elves. The culture war of the dark elves. Dear hobbits: the first problem you must leave to us is the culture war. It's making both our jobs harder. What you're doing here needs to be fixed, too, for you or us. Not only should you not be playing aggressive defense in the culture war - arguably, you shouldn't be playing defense at all. It would be best if you were playing offense. You are not equipped to play offense, but we are. So you should support us in playing offense. Because, like, this is what an alliance means. Dear hobbits: what can we dark elves do for you? We can lead you to victories which are actual victories. We can help you build a hobbit army that is ready to rule, which even feels the right to rule - which even has the right to rule. We can only help you once you are ready to stop struggling reflexively and start fighting strategically." - Unknown, not sure who the dark elves are, but I'm pretty sure we are the hobbits

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance" ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

"People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God - having a form of godliness but denying its power." – 2 Timothy 3:1-5 KJV

b. Art
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"The perfect blossom is a rare thing. You could spend your life looking for one, and it would not be a wasted life." - Katsumoto

"For most of our history art imitated life. Today life imitates art." - Cathy O'Brien

"An artist is someone who creates something without being told what to do." - Unknown

"Artists use lies to tell the truth. Politicians use them to cover it up." - V for Vendetta

"All art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art." - George Orwell

"Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter." - Roger Scruton

"We glorify lies, and we uglify beauty." - Unknown

"Through beauty, art cleans the world of our self-obsession." - Roger Scruton

c. Modern Art
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"Avant-garde is French for ********" — John Lennon

"Without a single degree, they created art that inspired generations (starry night/mona Lisa). And then artists with degrees arrived (banana taped to a wall/empty canvas). If anyone can do it, it isn't art." - Unknown

“Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made.” - JRR Tolkien

"The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War... To pursue its underground interest in America's lefty avant-garde, the CIA had to be sure its patronage could not be discovered. 'Matters of this sort could only have been done at two or three removes,' Mr Jameson explained, 'so that there wouldn't be any question of having to clear Jackson Pollock, for example, or do anything that would involve these people in the organisation. And it couldn't have been any closer, because most of them were people who had very little respect for the government, in particular, and certainly none for the CIA. If you had to use people who considered themselves one way or another to be closer to Moscow than to Washington, well, so much the better perhaps. Because Abstract Expressionism was expensive to move around and exhibit, millionaires and museums were called into play. Pre-eminent among these was Nelson Rockefeller, whose mother had co-founded the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As president of what he called 'Mummy's museum', Rockefeller was one of the biggest backers of Abstract Expressionism (which he called 'free enterprise painting'). His museum was contracted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom to organise and curate most of its important art shows." - Unknown

"Modern Art has been a way to launder and transfer money for eons. They even build museums for the crap and get stupid people to go to them and ogle over the 'art.' And the worst part is it degrades the value of real talented artists, and diverts some of them to thinking they can make "modern art" when there is no value in what they create. The funny thing is, Hunter's paintings are objectively better than 99% of what's in the MOMA. But that fact is irrelevant because every single piece of "modern art" produced over the last hundred years has been grist for a global money-laundering operation. The weirder and crappier it is, the more useful it is for money laundering. That's because actual good art is very, very, very difficult to produce. With so much crime happening in the world, there simply wasn't a big enough supply of good art to use for money laundering purposes. And of course, when crappy art is promoted, it drives out good art. It's a situation that's roughly analogous to Gresham's Law. (bad money pushes out the good)" - Unknown

Good things are easily destroyed but not easily created. Defend them. Ultimately, they have you fighting a culture war to keep you from fighting a class war.

"Unto the pure all things are pure: but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure; but even their mind and conscience is defiled. They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate." - Titus 1:15-16 KJV

d. Literature
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"The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read." - Mark Twain

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read." - James Baldwin after reading Dickens taught him that the things that tormented him most were the very things connecting him with everyone who had ever lived.

"Paper doesn’t refuse the printed word." - Unknown, anyone can write whatever they want on a sheet of paper. That doesn't make it true.

“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.” - Philip K. Dick

"Never read a book written by a journalist. Never read a book if you understand the table of contents" - Nassim Taleb

"NEW - UK counterterrorism program says interest in great literature is a sign of 'far-right extremism.'

The taxpayer-funded document included references to The Lord Of The Rings by JRR Tolkien, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, 1984 by George Orwell and the poems of GK Chesterton. Works by Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Tennyson, Kipling, and Edmund Burke were also included." - Unknown

"Piecing together Shakespeare's life is like reconstructing a dinosaur from a few bits of bone stuck together with plaster. We know more about the Stegosaurus than we know about Shakespeare." - Mark Twain on Shakespeare, the greatest playwright of all time. Shakespeare was born to a middle-class family (father a glove maker and mother a stay-at-home wife). He didn't go to college.

"He's the first gay man to be out during his lifetime and put back into the closet by his biographers." - Alex Little on TS Elliot and his famous poem 'The Wasteland' which, according to Wikipedia, is "widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry." The poem is actually an ode to a dead gay lover and the pain of living in a fake marriage. Numerous coded homosexual references occur throughout (e.g., Hiyacinth, Marianne, etc.). An essay was written in the '50s exposing Elliot, but was blocked by lawsuits.

"1948 - Kinsey / 1951 - Catcher in the rye / 1953 - Lolita” - Key milestones in American culture/literature

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