“We are mistaken when we believe that culture and the humanities are being served by scholarship. The truth is that art and culture do not belong in a university. It cannot be a home for them, because culture proper and scholarship proper are diametrically opposed” (Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve, p. 10).
A Culture’s Life Cycle More Than Cultural Life Choices
“It has been shown that, normally, the rise and fall of great nations are due to internal reasons alone. Ten generations of human beings suffice to transform the hardy and enterprising pioneer into the captious citizen of the welfare state” (John Glubb, The Fate of Empires, p. 24).
Famous for Being Famous
“Judging by the time and space allotted to them in the Press and television, football and baseball are the activities which today chiefly interest the public in Britain and the United States respectively. The heroes of declining nations are always the same—the athlete, the singer or the actor. The word ‘celebrity’ today is used to …
Austin Outer Limits
Been out of town for a few days . . . we were down in Austin, TX for a wedding. A wonderful time, great friends, a really fun town. One of the things we did during our off-hours was visit the Whole Foods Market there in Austin. I understand that it is a mongo-big chain, …
Sign, Sign, Everywhere A Sign
“In line with the postmodernist slogan that everything is a text, advertisers have turned the world into a gigantic billboard, making commercials out of everything from sporting events to shopping carts” (Gene Edward Veith, Postmodern Times, p. 178).
God’s Word in the World Metaphor
“As an orthodox Puritan, Bradstreet could not adumbrate the French symbolists by arguing that her words created meaning; the meaning of the sensible world was in the things of the sensible world themselves. It had been put there by god before all time; it was seen and uttered by the poet. To follow the latter …
And Which Explains Why Some People Still Like Heidegger
“To react against the modern is in many ways to revert to the primitive, the barbaric. The fascism of the 1930s was never a conservative movement (despite Marxist propaganda), but it was a reaction against the objectivity, rationalism, and alienation of the ‘modern world,’ a reaction structurally parallel to that of the postmodernists. Fascism, like …
And In Their Case, Badly Told
“When postmodernists say that life is a story, they do not mean, as the Christians did, that a story can be true; they mean that truth is only a story” (Gene Edward Veith, Postmodern Times, p. 130).
It’s Just That We Don’t Have a Screen That Big At Home
“Ironically, concerts today usually feature giant video screens so that fans can see the live performance up close by means of TV! Reality and reproduction are thus, in the postmodernist way, hopelessly confused” (Gene Edward Veith, Postmodern Times, p. 105).
A Local Deal
The Moscow School Board voted yesterday to hold an election in March to increase their supplemental levy by $1.97 million. Now there are a number of questions that normally swirl around levy issues. (Is the money used wisely? Why is MSD more expensive than other districts? Voters who pursue other education options being less inclined …