The Olympunks

The Olympics coverage on Yahoo (which is practically the only source of establisment news that I ever encounter - probably not the best situation) is getting on my nerves. Yes, a great deal of it is that Yahoo News itself just gets on my nerves, but there's more to it than that. I have no great insight here, and I couldn't care less about the Olympics, really, but it's annoying and alarming that professional athletes who are also high profile representatives of their repsective countries are carrying on like such babies. Moreover, the journalists who are disseminating stories about them aren't behaving much better. I mean, I've seen some decent writing, at least in terms of rhetorical skill, but the judgement of these writers seems skewed and adolescent in the extreme.


The people who are in control of our world right now are children, at least in terms of their ethical development. I know this already, but it is becomingly increasingly impossible to ignore as it begins to define the prevailing culture more and more totally.

Apparently I'm not fully grown myself. I say this because I keep being dumbfounded at all the silliness going in projects that adults are supposed to be in charge of. Like the Olympics, for instance. I assume that the people who are in charge of the Olympics, hello, are adults and know how to behave. Now, I have no reason to assume this. I know that Western culture is presently suffering from an acute state of arrested development. I know that spending bookoo bucks on a bunch of hyped-up, tacky opening ceremonies (replete with malfunctioning machinery - didn't those things look disturbingly like Superman's ice home in the movies from the 70's?) doesn't guarantee that anything dignified is going to occur. And yet this Russian skater with his self-awarded platinum medal still astounds me.

Well, this is what adults are like now, regardless of socio-economic background. All the various spheres of civilized life - the sports world, the academic world, the corporate world, the entertainment world, the art world, the politcal world, the medical world - they are all governed by children. Except these children have grown up bodies and ambitions, along with lots of money.

I can't help wondering if things were like this when I was a kid. Maybe so. They didn't seem to be. But then, I was just a kid.

Inconclusive Psuedo-Scientific Postscript

I fear this postscript will appear to be an example of the very thing I was criticizing in my next to last post. Neverthless, it's important to me that I make clear that I do not approve of the word nigger as a description of African-Americans. (Or is it "blacks"? Or "people of color"? See, everywhere you step around this issue, whether you zig or whether you zag, there's always some other can of worms to trip over. But I digress.) That is, it is a word that I would not allow my children to use in this way. I grew up in the South where the word is prevelant, and I applied it quite liberally as a lad. But now, as a semi-responsible adult and (most importantly) a Christian, I try not to use words with the conscious intention of insulting, shaming, defrauding, or otherwise oppressing human beings. And I do recognize that the word nigger has historically been used in this way.

Now then, that being said, the fact remains that the word-gestapo has a noxious, misanthropic, and devious agenda, and giving in to their intimidation is cowardice and results in cultural and intellectual death.

Wal-Mart Isn't An Eschatology, Either

As the old folks say back home, I'm "outta heart" with Doug Wilson. First of all, I can't remember my username for his blog, and since he changed the furniture around on there, I can't figure out how to get it to send me a reminder. Second, he posted something on there that I desperately want to respond to, but, like I said, I can't remember my username.

In this post of his, he starts out talking about the Pretenders song in which Chrissy Hynde asks what happened to the Ohio she used to know, since now instead of rivers and trees, it's a shopping mall. Then he goes into how folks who get fixated on the good old days are experiencing a type of arrested development and refusing to move ahead with the general eschatological momentum. He sums all of this up by saying that "Nostalgia is not an eschatology".

Well, let me begin by confessing that I decide what I am going to think largely by checking Doug's blog to see what he thinks. I am a product of American public education. As a result, I am mostly untrained in the art of thinking for myself, and my ideas are largely derivative. Whatever, it's one of the things us average folks just accept at some point. Nevertheless, I'm going to go out on a dialectical limb and disagree with the guru on this one.

Now on one hand I can of course appreciate what he's saying. The past is filled with many heroic epochs infinitely more valuable the 1950's but nevertheless infintely less valuable than whatever it is we will experience when God's will is done on Earth as it is in Heaven. From this perspective, for me to lament the archetypally fecund first half of the 2oth century is a bit retrograde. If eschatological man is going to be infinitely greater than Charlemagne, it goes without saying that he will surpass Barney Fife.

But on the other hand, the sentimental thing we refer to as nostalgia is not the only thing folks experience when they meditate on, or value, or even long for, the past. C.S. Lewis touches on this in The Weight of Glory. Wordsworth was wrong to consider his childhood the actual source of the loftiness and transcendence he perceived in the world, but he was not wrong to mine his childhood for the intimations of glory that his childhood actually did contain. The past is as much God's work as the future is. The acorn exists for the sake of the oak, but an acorn is not contemptible because it is not an oak.

Speaking of Lewis, I think he might agree with me that what we call decadent nations are those which more nearly attained their own measure of glory in the past than they are doing at present. I am thinking of something like what Lewis calls Logres in That Hideous Strength: that true angel of the British Isles that has always existed along with that other development we call merely England. If anything like this is possible, then looking back is sometimes really a type of looking forward, a way of hoping that what is and always has been best and most glorious about a nation will finally prevail.

Lastly, there's the whole thing too where what we call progress really ain't. That's what I mean when I say that Wal-Mart isn't an eschatology, either. Nostalgia or no, I would have preferred the indigenous live oaks and cypresses around Orlando to all the plastic trees in Disneyworld.

What's With All The Tearful Apologies, Then?

Apparently rock star John Mayer used the word nigger in an interview recently then made an impromptu "tearful apology" about it to an audience in the middle of a concert. Apparently it was a very emotional experience not only for Mayer but also for his audience and his band.

Mayer has said that as a result of the media hype following his interview, he is not going to play the "media game" anymore because, he laments, the media twists one's words all out of whack. But if he's been misrepresented, why is he crying and apologizing? He says he never should have used the word and will never use it again. Come on. Never? Not even to say, "Honey, please don't say nigger, you know how much I hate it; now be a dear and pass the AllFruit"? Or what if he wants to request Gayniggers from Outer Space from Netflix? Is he allowed to as long as he is white and sensitive?

Isn't it curious how even a person who doesn't think they've done anything wrong and who insists they've been misrepresented is still compelled to apologize for what they didn't do? And isn't it curious too that they don't see how wierd and irrational this is?

Okay, look, I'm annoyed by Mayer's moody rocker persona. And I'm annoyed that he has tried to intellectualize his tearful pandering to political correctness by saying (this was almost semi-clever) that he used the "N word" because he thought he could be clever and intellectualize it. In other words, he is pointing out how he made the kind of error that only impulsive, well-intentioned, intellectual pop stars make. Something along the line of Hiedegger saying, a couple decades after his stint as Nazi apologist: "Those who think greatly must err greatly."

But despite the fact the he is kind of annoying, hadn't folks ought to just let him "say what he needs to say"?

I don't care for Barak Obama's method of being president any more than I care for Mayer's music. Or of Obama's wife's method of being, you know, whatever she is. But when Obama calls some reporter sweetie; or when off the record (or so he thought) he calls Kanye a jack ass; or when his wife mentions that one of her kids used to be a bit overweight; must the same word- police who voted Obama into office haul him before the public opinion tribunals for speech crime? (Or maybe just speech faux pas. It may technically only be a crime when white folks and Republicans do it.)

Anyway, I don't admire any one of the three all that much, but there are more important things to worry about. And Kanye is a jackass.