Sclerosis Usually Leads to Death

Timothy Birdnow

Here is an essay about the entertainment industry's eternal love affair with the 1990's that is worth a read.

As the author points out, most decades get their tribute at some point. In the '70's we had American Graffiti and Happy Days and other tributes to the '50's. In the eighties there was a lot of reminiscing about the sixties,and so forth and so on. It usually comes after twenty years.

But Hollywood and the rest seem stuck in this nineties mode, unwilling to move on.

The author of this piece gets part of it correct:

And in fact the author hit on one of the reasons WHY there was nothing after the nineties:


I would say it MORALIZES rather than memorializes. There is nothing memorable because, in part, everything was politicized, turned to the service of political correctness. A scold is not memory-worthy.

Political correctness is an old idea, one stemming from the Bolshevik Revolution. It made no headway in the West until it was adopted by an increasingly leftist academia in the '80's, and it metastasized in the '90's. By the end of that decade it was sitting on the throne in all major entertainment fields, and with it the censorship of speech made it impossible to actually SAY anything, anything of interest or humor, anyway. Everything was scrubbed, sanitized, and homogenized. (On the network Laff when they put on movies made before 2000 they put up a disclaimer "some may find the views wildly offensive" - at least they are putting those movies on, but they often bleep out language that was fine at the time because it's not considered appropriate now.) Nothing since has had any spice. It's all baby food.

So there is nothing to remember about anything since the Clinton era.

The article continues:


But that's not all. There was the arrival of the internet during the late '90's, and computer gaming and other computer entertainment. This shattered the unity of culture we used to all participate in, and now with podcasts and the like there just isn't any one culture anymore.

Now the young don't DO anything; they spend their whole lives surfing the web and texting. You simply can't make any sort of television show, or movie, that appeals to the modern youths anymore. They have become one with the machine, and they are acting more and more like machines. They don't want driver's licenses, they don't want jobs, they don't want in-class schooling. They just want their machines. They have become slaves to the technocrats.

How do you, say, write a sitcom that would appeal to such? It's impossible. And with political correctness sanitizing everything there just isn't anything to catch the interest of the youth of today.

Jerry Seinfeld stopped doing gigs at colleges; he couldn't tell any jokes without offending people. Nobody has a sense of humor anymore because they have been dilligently taught to be offended at everything.

This has been going on since the turn of the century, I might add.

We have a culture that is sick with ennui and boredom. The young can't find anything in life that interests them. They don't do anything, they don't really even think anything. They just stumble about in a fog.

So since the turn of the century culture has melted away. yes, the television culture always was a BAD culture but at least it existed, even if it was destructive. Now there is nothing, a bland paste.

The author comes close with this:


He's right; kids by and large aren't going to relive the days of cheesy video games or old technology. Some have tried,and in fact that brought the vinyl record back. The young who drink (ew do these days, to their detriment s they don't experience even the crazy times of adolescent boozing) have returned to "heirloom beer" like Schlitz or Pabst or Stagg (shudder!) But this is a nostalgia movement that goes to a time BEFORE their era, not to their era. Their era is dry white toast and they know it. Why bring back old computer technology when the new stuff is so much better?

He really gets it here:


I've said this myself; all those who make movies or television programs can do these days is remake old hits, or do new takes on comic book superheroes. How many Batmen movies are there? Spider man? Superman? The screen writers keep rehashing this because they have nothing else to say. We live in a silent generation.

And since the great books and legends of our past are being purposely erased by the Left the writers and producers are afraid to touch THOSE. They are forced to turn to the lowest form of literature, the comic book and pulp fiction.

I would argue too that that was intentional by the Left. They had hoped to melt our culture away and replace it with a radical new one, one that emphasized political action and radical thinking. It has worked to a degree, but the destruction of the old culture has led to a world of young people who have simply tuned out all culture, and try to create their own online. They have decided to drop out of reality.

And that was a logical decision; reality became very painful under the last fifty years, especially since the sexual revolution. How many young people were from broken families? Started having sex too soon in no small part because the culture was telling them to do so? They became satiated with the culture being given them, and life was hard and painful, and unless a young person was going to do something very rash (like shoot up a school) they had no other option but to retreat into a dream world and try to ignore the very painful reality they faced.

It's part of why we see so much of this LGBTQ stuff; young people desperately seeking something to ease their pain. They don't understand their pain, just know it's real and think "maybe this will fix things".

The essay continues:


Yep; nailed it there. After 2000 everything stopped being written by creative people and became mass-produced, cheap commercialism.

I would argue that's why country music became so big; it was still personal and genuine. But it was about the only thing. Rap had that blessing too early on but by 2000 had become nothing but a corporate anthem.

Another thing to look at is Globalism. Globalism meant corporations wanted to appeal to all nations, not just America, and so they systematically purged America, and in fact anything remotely Western, from their products. Everything had to become blandly international. And of course the Chinese funded most movies and had no love for America so they insisted all films be sanitized, Oh, and many are made in Canada, which has always been a bland, sanitized place thanks to their blend of Anglo and Franco cultures.

The whys of it probably don't matter all that much. The fact remains that any culture that loses it's creativity, it's uniqueness, it's sense of meaning, is one doomed to destruction. America's dying film and television industry is a very, very bad sign; it is indicative of a nation that has lost faith in it's own institutions, it's own culture and traditions. And it's lost what little creativity existed in Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment industry.

I suspect in twenty years (assuming things continue as they are now) we'll see a revival of the '20's' era as the Trump era has real personality, and we are actually talking again, and things matter again. I think the youths of today will indeed remember this era fondly. It's been a long, long time since we had anything but bland internationalism and speech codes.

But then, if the Trump era ends prematurely we see our culture fail completely. That would be a dirty shame.

Suffice it to say our culture is ossified and calcified, stuck in amber, however you want to say it. Nations in times past that had such ossification died. Look at the antebellum South. Look at Rome. Sclerosis  usually leads to death.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:24 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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