I reveal certain prejudices when I say Beauty–a neo-Romanticism we might conclude, but then the Romantics had more heart while yet keeping their heads.
I don’t have to look long to see how in love with doubt as a form of wisdom I have come to be in this culture–just reveal that you actually know something in a group of anyone you understand to have been fully formed by our systematic under-education over the last quarter of a century. Doubt, doubt and more doubt is all I ever need to know–Truth as Beauty or Beauty Truth has long been lost in the mists of Post-post Structuralist mystifications. Even in politics this is the only guidance we allow. It is the one overriding reason such trash gets accepted in our political campaigning, the levels of demagoguery matched only by the depths of semi-literacy–alphabetics, really. All of us, yes, able to spell our names correctly. This of the possibilities–infinite possibilities–the true profit margin. {You do remember that infinite possibility is an avalanche waiting to bury us.]
Of course, it is correct to assess that political campaigns have always been comprised of that which expresses the lesser of ourselves, the lower of our impulses, the baser of our instincts, an oversimplification at best, or at worst, the grossest in the simplistic that is possible before all campaigning falls down in an avalanche of fragments. What is striking, though, is the lessening of the critique against the way we elect; moreover, the remove from which anyone tries to levy an alternative to how we elect, how we campaign, or what the media does with our politics and politicking, how they package our politicians. Campaigns have become alternative entertainment, had become such as soon as television sunk its fangs into the political body; this reinforced by how reality shows have gained such popularity. How can anyone not see Donald Trump making big bucks in another reality TV success?
The media, of course, rarely critiques itself; that would be too much to ask. I know. The inarticulateness on our part has left us in a position where the potential for opposing politics as it gets played on the American stage is approaching impossible. I, who do oppose contemporary politics as it has been played in the arenas of states across the globe, have also helped create a cultural weakness in itself a strength only in its power to debilitate. Weakness is weakness, though, just as strength remains strength. The latter can only cleave to the latter, never the former. This is immutable. I should look closely at our most recent historical precedence over the last one hundred or more years, particularly the last fifty or sixty here in America, but most assuredly in France as well as here in the United States–there is a pervading nihilism at the heart of our common Western culture, worse, at the core of our civilization, yes, Western Civilization (something for which too many of my friends and/or colleagues, molded by one or another Post-post-Structuralist/Post-post-Modernist critique during their tenure as students in the American Academy, have spent too much time resenting to understand, if they have not spent more time exercising futility by denying its existence, if not simply trying to rhetorically undermine its validity, or, if nothing else, its contemporary viability).
The Falling Leaf Review 