Adorno Made Him Do It

I bet it was Althusser who drove him over the edge.

“And I started to analyze the courses that I took, and I realized that this was cultural Marxist theory.”

I’m not going to watch the video because I already know what he’s going to say. It’s a canned analysis. Breitbart didn’t start to “analyze” anything. The anti-PC party line was delivered to him courtesy of the Free Congress Foundation. Just like it was implanted in chapter four of Patrick Buchanan’s 2002 book, The Death of the West. The rough draft was published in a Lyndon Larouchite journal in 1992. The television broadcast was made in 1999 and the version that Oslo terrorist, Anders Breivik plagiarized comes from a 2004 FCF pamphlet.

This isn’t the early 1990s version of the “Political Correctness” culture wars. It’s a jazzed up, crazed-up apocalyptic conspiracy theory rendition of the nasty old swindle.

By the way, Michael, a must read is Martin Jay’s article in the Fall-Winter 2010-2011 Salmagundi, “Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Franfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe,” in which Jay tells about his being sandbagged by William S. Lind/Free Congress Foundation television documentary, “Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School.”

See: Martin Jay Spills Some Beans!

See also Chip Berlet’s and my posts about the extent of Breivik’s plagiarism from Lind’s “Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology.”

Berlet: Oslo Terrorism Roundup

Berlet: Updated: Breivik’s Core Thesis is White Christian Nationalism v. Multiculturalism

Sandwichman: What is Cultural Conservatism?

Sandwichman: Confessions of a Cultural Marxist

#3 — right. It’s not just that the plural of anecdote is conservative. The anecdotes themselves are far more often than not complete bs. You have to assume that the likes of Breitbart will be foolish, fanatical, and dishonest, or you’ll get at least partially rolled.

The way he claims to have thought that studying Mark Twain would be “a benign approach toward the American experience” suggests that he still hasn’t read Twain—at least not beyond “Tom Sawyer”. No-one who’s actually read “Huck Finn” could have said that.

Maybe he read the Illustrated Classics version. I think this is the second time in as many months where I can use Huck Finn as an example of why it’s so hard to learn about this sort of stuff on your own – there’s some great bits in there about, for example, certain books a family of “quality” is supposed to have on public display. But if you don’t know the titles, what they were about and who they were written by, all of that will go right over your head. Unless you are reading it under the direction of an English prof who can point out the historical context and the significance and of those seemingly irrelevant details.

only gradually and reluctantly coming to the conclusion that he’d been assigned a toxic mixture of Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Noam Chomsky.

Of course, since it’s Breitbart, he’s actually referring to a toxic mixture of Richard Benjamin, Giorgio Armani, and Norm the Cheers guy.

Not necessarily inconsistent, but quoted in the linked Bauerlein piece:

“I was an American Studies major, and I really did think that when I chose that [major] it would be reading about the Constitution and the Founding Fathers, Mark Twain and, sort of, a benign approach toward the American experience.”

From his recently published memoir, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!:

So as I walked out of the student union with that letter [a notice he was late in declaring a major – JPS] in hand, I marched up to an attractive group of blond coeds with whom I was socially familiar. Part to make them laugh and part to finally make up my mind, I told them that by the end of our conversation, they would decide my major for me. After less than five minutes of discussing my academic interests or lack thereof, we decided on American Studies. What a stud, huh?

What’s that you say about strange jargon not accessible to the average person?

Eh, whatever. People really shouldn’t be seriously influenced by their college classes. So far, except for economics (which pushed me in a more environmentalist as well as libertarian direction), college classes haven’t really changed my worldview much.

One night in my first year at college, I had a dream. Never been the same since. (I was more of an individualist anarchist before then.) What seems amazing as well as deeply disappointing to me now is that I never said a word to Williams in three years, despite the fact that I actually lived & studied in the same institution & occasionally saw him about the place. But then, what would I have said – “I was deeply impressed by the book you wrote 25 years ago, no not that one, the other one”? Wasted on the young.

“Special Topics” allows students to devote an entire semester to slavery or genocide or imperialism (or any two in combination, with the approval of one’s advisor);

We’re a slavery, genocide and imperialism school. Well, we can do you slavery and imperialism without the genocide, and we can do you genocide and imperialism without the slavery, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can’t give you slavery and genocide without the imperialism. Imperialism is compulsory. They’re all imperialism, you see.

26 — So much makes sense now.

Political Correctness: Frankfurter School 101: This is a two-week summer course all Nathan’s employees take on how to make small talk with the customers. It’s taught by faculty from the Oskar Mayer (family name was Matzerath) Academy of Hot Dog Hermeneutics. Huckleberry Hound occasionally gives a guest lecture.

Send him a Twain piece on anti-imperialism, claim it’s from the New York Times and he’d be righteously denouncing its anti-Americanism.

It might be even more fun to ask him to guess who said this: “I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.”

ajay@37: Hmm, I guess you could say the USSR came already internally-imperialized thanks to the the Tsarist regime.

Don’t forget about Central Asia. Nancy Condee characterized the Soviet Union pretty aptly as an anti-imperialist empire.

Bill Benzon @34: Pardon the cliche: ROFLOL!

Bill Benzon @35: “The good olde days.”

How about, “Fortunately, Mussolini recognized the danger Gramsci posed and jailed him.” THOSE were the days, mein freund!

Sometime during the last half-century, someone stole our culture. Just 50 years ago, in the 1950s, America was a great place. It was safe. It was decent. Children got good educations in the public schools. Even blue-collar fathers brought home middle-class incomes, so moms could stay home with the kids. Television shows reflected sound, traditional values.

Where did it all go? How did that America become the sleazy, decadent place we live in today – so different that those who grew up prior to the ’60s feel like it’s a foreign country? Did it just “happen”?

It didn’t just “happen.” In fact, a deliberate agenda was followed to steal our culture and leave a new and very different one in its place. The story of how and why is one of the most important parts of our nation’s history – and it is a story almost no one knows. The people behind it wanted it that way.

What happened, in short, is that America’s traditional culture, which had grown up over generations from our Western, Judeo-Christian roots, was swept aside by an ideology. We know that ideology best as “political correctness” or “multi-culturalism.” It really is cultural Marxism, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms in an effort that goes back not to the 1960s, but to World War I. Incredible as it may seem, just as the old economic Marxism of the Soviet Union has faded away, a new cultural Marxism has become the ruling ideology of America’s elites. The No. 1 goal of that cultural Marxism, since its creation, has been the destruction of Western culture and the Christian religion.

To understand anything, we have to know its history. To understand who stole our culture, we need to take a look at the history of “political correctness.”

…

Gramsci famously laid out a strategy for destroying Christianity and Western culture, one that has proven all too successful. Instead of calling for a Communist revolution up front, as in Russia, he said Marxists in the West should take political power last, after a “long march through the institutions” … Fortunately, Mussolini recognized the danger Gramsci posed and jailed him.

The trains ran on time.

Keep your government hands off my Amtrak!

Argh. I know the right thing to do is mock and stop with that, but honestly this kind of stuff makes me furious because I think Breitbart is just the latest decomposing slurry at the bottom of a deep well of sinister appropriation. Meaning, I honestly think that a decade ago there were some people who really had heartfelt feelings about their feelings of a gap between their expectations about what the subject of literary study or American history was and what the content of academic study turned out to be. Not to the discredit of academics at all, because that gap had opened up for good reasons, and was a product of a meaningful intellectual history. It was (and I think still is) worth exploring how it happened, what it meant, and some of how that gap played into a public discourse about the humanities. The problem is that people more cunning and nasty than Breitbart, who is pure thug from beginning to end, have so thoroughly used and poisoned any possible exploration that it’s a hopeless conversation from the moment it starts.

God, I haven’t thought about Mark Bauerlein in years. And I didn’t even realize how blissful those years were… until I saw this post.

& there’s the poem John Hollander built around Chomsky’s line:

Curiously deep, the slumber of crimson thoughts:
While breathless, in stodgy viridian,
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.