It’s Your Game to Lose, America

The king called up his jet fighters
He said you better earn your pay
Drop your bombs between the minarets
Down the Casbah way

As soon as the Shareef was
Chauffeured outta there
The jet pilots tuned to
The cockpit radio blare

As soon as the Shareef was
Outta their hair
The jet pilots wailed

In 1982 The Clash released their hit “Rock the Casbah”, the third track on their album Combat Rock; it’s a song which thumbs its nose at the Islamic dictatorships which were taking over the Middle East and North Africa at the time.  It’s a song that pounds with military-style confidence in Western exceptionalism.   And it’s a song which comes straight out of the historical context it found itself in: the Ronald Reagan era.  Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Reagan’s presidency would see a revitalization throughout all cultural mediums.  “Rock the Casbah” was just the beginning of a shift from maudlin peacenik music, to something more masculine and forceful.  Action heroes dominated the box office, and America reasserted itself as an aggressive economic powerhouse.  The 80s were a brief, optimistic golden age which rediscovered the hard work and confidence of the post-WWII era, while integrating the new cultural norms from the 60s, but by the 90s it had fizzled out.  The Neocons and Neomarxists were back in charge.

In three weeks, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States, and already we’re seeing the cultural shift back towards exceptionalism and greatness.  The recent Star Wars movie Rogue One toned down the social justice elements between the release of the trailer and the film itself, and soon Hollywood will be moving away from perversities like Modern Family, a series which seeks to normalize homosexuality, to something that reinforces traditional values.

Presumably at this point we will grow comfortable, and soon enough the pendulum will swing back towards the ever accelerating decline.

The problem going forward is that our means and ends don’t match up.  Consider the problem with the Self Help Industry: the best Self Help book is not the one which benefits the majority of readers – it’s the one that makes the greatest number of readers feel good about themselves, so that they buy the sequel.  Similarly, the most successful political movement isn’t the one which effects the change it set out to create; rather, it’s the movement which generates perpetual outrage, and successfully monetizes it with warm fuzzies.

Fake News has been a term bandied about quite a bit lately; on the one hand it’s simply the new version of ‘Conspiracy Theory’, a term used to discredit anything other than the Establishment Pravda¹; in fact, producing Fake News has now become an act of treason, to be enforced by the Department of Homeland Security, as per the “Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act of 2016” which was passed into law on December 8th.

On the other, Fake News is a major problem, a creation of social media’s drive towards enormity, and a population which prefers emotivism to principles.

The best way to rise to the top of Twitter’s greasy pole² is to court attention at all costs.³ Not only do facts take a back seat to outrage, consistency itself must be sacrificed as well.  The successful blog/newspaper/radio personality will not be the one that clings to the values of Truth, Justice, and the American Way; it will be the one which defines itself by its opposition to another group, even when that group happens to be right about something.  Feminists vs Antifeminists; Race Realists vs Anti-racists; even Pro-life vs Pro-Choice eventually falls into this dynamic, where both sides rely upon one another to justify fundraising and outrage, and meaningful change is never accomplished.  Politics becomes a tpi of opposing logs resting on one another, inside of which Grendel and her clan of wendigos take comfort.

The Donald Trump presidency offers an opportunity for real change, for a return to organic patriarchy and sustainable growth… but I don’t think you want that.  Being a patriarch requires hard work and responsibility; running a harem doesn’t, and it provides ample opportunity to enjoy pleasures of the flesh, while complaining about women’s lack of loyalty.

Self Help may be a scam, but The Secret was right about one thing: what you choose to focus on will become your reality.  If you choose to focus on outrage, then you’ll empower that which outrages you.  Big Brother can’t exist without Emmanuel Goldstein, after all, and if egoism and moral superiority is your goal, then your enemies must continue to exist.  The end goal of war is supposed to be peace, but when the military-industrial complex takes it over the end goal is continued low-level conflict.

Do you want to make America great again?  Or do you want to blame your problems on other people?  As you sew, so shall you reap, America.  Either get to work building and growing – or admit that you love outrage as much as the triggeriest of SJWs.

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1. Pravda Means Truth, by Robert A. Heinlein

2. Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister during the late 19th century and a dirty Jew an honourable Tory who tried to restrain the Liberal excesses of that pompous, self-righteous fool Gladstone.

3. Law number six of The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene.

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