Great column. But again I think this coarsening of culture has permeated right through the West
“…Joni Mitchell wrote “Both Sides Now” in 1967. Though she wrote it in the midst of the ’60s cataclysm of protests against the Vietnam War, the advent of free love and all that that entailed, and what seemed like an all-out rebellion against everything that had come before, it was a sweet song about clouds and how children see them. Like Peter Yarrow’s “Puff the Magic Dragon”, it was just a lovely song. Sure, there is wistfulness in it, regret and ambivalence can be read into the lyrics. But it was well and truly just a beautiful song. And that was the turbulent sixties.
“Rows and rows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I’ve looked at clouds that way”
Fast forward to 2016. There are no beautiful melodies to what is still called “music” but is not music at all. Consider Kanye West’s latest, called “Facts”:
“Dirt and grime and filth inside
The story of my lifetime
Of cheating, stealing, never feeling
Pain of a brother, your dirty mother…” We won’t quote the rest because his lyrics are truly disgusting to anyone born before 1995.
The transformation of American music naturally coincides with the transformation of American traditions on every level. The Left’s agenda begun in earnest in the 60s has come to fruition with regard to music, culture, and of course, politics. Despite its responsibility for the election of Richard Nixon in 1972, (the public was horrified by the “radicals’” demands and behavior) the adherents of the “new Left” succeeded in taking over nearly the whole of academia where it has been entrenched ever since. Those tenured radicals have done a good job teaching three generations of young people to loathe their own country and dismiss the Constitution as a document written by old white men without a shred of relevance for their lives today. Today speech must be restricted, trigger warnings provided, safe spaces afforded lest someone be offended.
Today’s millennials actually believe that George Bush killed more people than Stalin! They have purposefully been taught a falsified history of America (thank you, Howard Zinn). They have purposefully been taught that communism was not responsible for a hundred million deaths in the twentieth century. They have been lied to, those who went to school, about countless important events and issues in America’s past and they have been thoroughly indoctrinated to hate everything great about this country. The left foments racial animosity. It’s what they do. It serves their purpose. Martin Luther King is spinning in his grave….” The Dissolution of American Culture