Abstention Doctrine: She is a Bespoke Car Wreck. On to "The Crisis of Culture."

I am only a couple weeks into detox from Glenn Loury and his side kick, John McWhorter's sometimes joint video chats. I call them both Black white supremacist sympathizers, enablers. Because any Black man who buys into the baseless, infantile, and ignorant lies about "western" cultural superiority is behaving exactly like white supremacist sympathizers, enablers would. And therefore have earned that description. But wait. There is more coming about idiots who don't really understand culture to come!

One of the reasons I go to the Owl's blog is, she is one of those on-paper smart people, who often says such unintentionally funny shit, I want to see how she is embarrassing herself, nearly daily, but I do take breaks from her shit. But usually, it is like back in the day when I used to read a daily tabloid newspaper, and had to check my favorite funnies. But oftentimes, she is just tiresome. Like today. Not so much because of the article that caught her eye and posted about. But tiresome because she went into grammar/syntax Nazi mode. And the only thing more tiresome than a spelling Nazi could be a grammar/syntax Nazi. Anyway . . .

It was some review of sorts about some social commentary book, by some guy called,"The Crisis of Culture." He's French. That flavor of French. The kind of tiresome Frenchman who has the time and inclination to bemoan the mash up of cultures.

I have an earned degree in Theatre. That is a variant of an academic program in culture, as Theatre even more that lit, is the original human storytelling tradition. Our stories are greatly a reflection of and a record of our cultures. So I call bullshit on the hypothesis. All cultures we pay any attention to, have been mashed up with other cultures, going back thousands of years. That is an easily verifiable fact. And you need not earn a degree in Theatre, World Lit, ot World History to learn that factoid! Anyone who denies that is a practiced, ignorant fool. Now let me really digress.

I have been seeing reports that the "posh" British accent is actually a modern recent thing. And as well, that the Elizabethan era accent should have sounded more like American English than the posh one. Marvellous! Just another fine example of the stupid shit people think they know, but is flat out wrong!

Anyway, I skipped the article she posted, and googled the scholar, Oliver Roy. and found a critique.

From that:

"The Crisis of Culture is therefore best read as an insightful and often brilliant theoretical framework that can fall apart when applied to the specific human actions it is meant to explain. To understand why old systems and cultures have become pathologized, it does not suffice to claim that they have simply disappeared, or exist only as innocuous folklorème. They are still with us, even if only in the guise of radicalism—calling for performative action."

Whatever, Trevor. And by saying that, I am being deliberately, partially dismissive of that guy, too. In this critique, as well as the book, the multi headed beast called appropriation, rears up. I am not going long on that shit. But since I approach these matters from the POV, that before America was a melting pot, Western Europe was. And before Western Europe was. the Mid East was. I will move on to the really important question, where the international version of culture wars are concerned.

Which faction is the most tiresome? Cultural purists who bemoan the mashing up of cultural shit, or the other kind, who lose their shit when ever some minor facet of "their" culture gets used by other humans?

I think both are insufferable. Actually. But I am a big fan of The Silk Road Ensemble, and Rhiannon Giddens is my Musical Warrior Goddess.