Or why Dennis Prager is a total hoot ...

(Above: or modern art or young people or leftists or utopianists or whatever else you've got).


Every so often the pond comes across a post which makes its day.

Any discovery of any distilled essence of "get off my lawn" outburst is to be treasured as a day-maker ...

Truth to tell, the pond knew very little about Dennis Prager, when it stumbled across Why the Left Hates the Old , but let's be fair, it immediately resonated as a classic bit of silliness and nonsense.

The thesis is that the old hate angry white males - presumably on the basis that there can't be any old white angry socialist or commie bastard males - are always being dissed by upstarts and young 'uns, and worst of all, pinko leftie perverts ...

Where it gets fun is when Prager ventures on to turf he clearly knows little about, which is to say art ...

What he knows about theory and practice could be written on a pinhead, or perhaps by a pinhead:

The left's attack on teaching the works of "Dead White European Males" was one such example. It infuriated the left that Shakespeare was studied so much more than, let us say, living Guatemalan playwrights. As a result, one can now obtain a college degree in English -- let alone every other liberal arts department -- without having taken a course in Shakespeare.

Prager probably thought he'd scored a hit to the jugular with his note on Shakespeare and a huge laugh with his joke about living Guatemalan playwrights.

But he's only just getting going:

So, too, in art and music, the new is almost always favored over the old. New composers and artists -- no matter how untalented -- are studied as much as or more than the great masters of old. And the old standards of excellence are neglected in favor of the latest avant-garde experimentation.

Now let's forget this is nonsense - check the repertoire at your local symphony or opera company before proceeding - because we have to skip along a little to keep the art theme going:

That is a major reason for the left's problem with the old: If the old is great, then they and their new ideas are probably not that great. 
Just about everyone who is not on the cultural left knows that all the great masters were incomparably superior to Jackson Pollock and other 20th-centuries artists who produced meaningless and talentless art. And because there are so few artists at any time who measure up to the old standards (standards that are synonymous with standards of excellence), the old standards have simply been abandoned.

Uh huh. So he doesn't like Jackson Pollock.

But what's this talk about standards of excellence, and is Pollock all he's got as evidence?

Sure, nobody can touch Rembrandt and Vemeer for their use of light, but then nobody can touch the Impressionists - oh those Manet waterlilies at the Musée de l'Orangerie - and what on earth does he make of van Gogh?

If you don't like the abstract expressionists, what are you going to do with twentieth century artists like Edward Hopper?

Or what about Picasso? Or any number of talented artists who enlivened the twentieth century.

The idea of a golden time, of perfected standards of excellence, is pure and sublime horseshit. Art didn't get to be perfect, and then stop dead in its tracks, so that we could all keep doing the same riff over and over again ...

The same applies to music - nobody out-Beethovens Beethoven (or out-Mozarts Mozart) but then there's no one who out-Shostakovichs Shostakovich, unless it's Bartok sending him up ...

And so on and so forth, but here's the capper. This utopian ratbag, yearning for a long lost past of genius dead white males, then has the cheek to scribble this:

What, then, is at the core of the left's contempt for the old, and its celebration of the new and of change? There are two primary answers. 
One is the yearning for utopia. Since Marx, the left has sought utopia in this world. And that means constantly transforming every aspect of society.

No, no, you wonderfully comic goose. That's not what utopia means, you with your blather about the past is the utopian:

1. an imaginary island described in Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) as enjoying perfection in law, politics, etc. 
2. (usu. l.c.) any ideal place or state. 
3. (usu. l.c.) any visionary system of political or social perfection.

You know, you're the one that's talking up a past utopia ... a perfect standard-setting past, where Rembrandt is the house painter, until he gets ragged and wild in his old age, and Shakespeare the house playwright, until he starts to lose interest or writes a dud like King John, and Beethoven heads the band on the Friday night gig, at least until he starts doing arrangements of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones ...

So when you come to this line, you realise Prager is either barking mad or clueless, or most likely a bit of both:

By definition, those who seek to transform consider the old essentially worthless.

You know, you don't have to seek to transform - death does a perfectly good job of it.

It's impossible to live in stasis. You can't spend your time just copying down Shakespeare word for word, or Beethoven note for note, and the notion that the twentieth century was an aesthetic void is pure alienated stupidity. I mean, let's keep it xenophobic and parochial, in the approved American angry old man style, and just note that jazz and the American musical have made enormous contributions to the y'artz...

I mean, there are some cluckheads and dunderheads who want to write off the movies and television as incapable of hosting any kind of art ... Tell us Charlie ...

“The cinema is little more than a fad. It’s canned drama. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage.” Charlie Chaplin, 1916

But wait, there's more, plenty more, and usually thuck as a bruck, as our NZ friends say:

Rejection of the old is a reason the left has contempt for the Bible. To progressives, the idea of having 2,000 and 3,000-year-old texts guide a person's behavior today is ludicrous.

Which is incredibly silly. If only because the bible and Christianity is the perfect haven for genuine heaven-believing, heaven-seeking utopians ...

Let's leave aside the splendid poetry in the King James version, which, it has to be said, has been varied and ruined by fundamentalist American Christians these past few centuries, in various new translations of an American kind, always wanting to change the past, always contemptuous of the old ways and the old days and the old, sometimes erroneous words of the King James version ...

Let's instead just mention all the tensions between the Old and New Testaments, as that relentless change monger, Jesus Christ, decided to give the old rules a good going over, and install himself as the centre of the action, and the son of god - and worst of all, he was only 32 or 33 or thereabouts when he carried on about the angry old Judeans then running the show ...

Naturally Prager also works in the American constitution, presumably not understanding that Britain has got on perfectly well without all that written down bit of ancestor worship, and then builds to this closing sign off rant:

Nevertheless the left has transformed "old" -- a title that commanded respect in every civilization prior to the pre-1960s West -- into a pejorative. 

Yep, never mind the senility or the silliness, feel the grey hair. Never mind that young or old, you should earn respect by sounding half-way sane rather than by simply sounding off ...

As a result we live in the age of new music, new art, new families, new morality, new education, and now new marriage. If you think all these are good, then "old white males," like almost everything else old, do indeed constitute a threat. 
If you think the left's belief in "new" and "change" hurts society, "old" sounds good.

"Change" hurts society?

Dude, you can't avoid change. Rust never sleeps, entropy always wins, you can't live in Thomas More's utopia, it's done and dusted, and we're all going to die ...

It's better to burn out than it is to rust 
The king is gone but not forgotten

Now the pond doesn't identify with the words "left" or "progressive", but one thing's for sure, Prager is clearly a dumb old angry white male, with a very limited understanding of art, life, pain, love or the whole damn thing ...

But he's a great comedian. which possibly helps explain why it turns that he's a nationally syndicated radio talk show host, syndicated columnist, author and speaker in the United States.

Why he even has his own wiki here.

It says a heckuva a lot about mainstream America and its current political situation.

Apparently one of Prager's quotes is this:

"The absurd keeps you sane".

Actually it's the loons that keep you laughing, and so we have to give credit to Whiskey Fire for introducing us to a man it dubbed a Jurassic fart ...  cruel until you actually read the words on offer.

But as a bonus, the pond forgot about the domestic commentariat and the reptiles at the lizard Oz for hours and hours and hours ...

(Below: XKCD on this age issue, which it has to be said, torments the pond. More XKCD here)