The Decline of Art in Western Culture Parallels the Decline of Everything Else

For most of western history art was used as a way for patrons to showcase achievements or propagandize citizens or lionize individuals.  Maybe the single greatest artist in human history, Michelangelo, created his greatest works for patrons of various sorts.  David he created for the Florentine Guild of Wool, the Pieta for the French ambassador to the Holy See and the Sistine Chapel and St Peter's Basilica for popes. Art was, in one way or another an homage to something greater than its creator. 

Fast-forward about three centuries and the art world begun to change.  Art as an indulgence of artists, where they would paint whatever they wanted, with or without a desire that someone would pay for it is largely a child of the late 19^th century.  That’s when Impressionism, that distinctly unconventional, non traditional form or painting emerged.  In a very short period of time the world of art went from uber traditional world of Bouguereau to the anything but world of Monet, Renoir and Van Gogh.  Suddenly art was no longer a vehicle for vanity or the celebration of greatness or storytelling.  It was something else. 

In 1917 Marcel Duchamp, a French artist unveiled a urinal on a wooden box and called it “Fountain”.  A hundred years later art had “evolved” so much that a banana taped to a wall with duct tape (an actual banana… not plastic or paper mâché) would sell for $120,000 in 2019…

It is into this universe of art that we find what is supposed to be cutting edge and courageous, in the form of the Pietà by German designer Harald Glööckler.  The revisualization of the classic piece features a tattooed Christ and a trans Mary.  And what’s courageous about this piece?  It stands up to those vicious, hateful… Christians. 

In the cacophony of 2023, while there are other issues that are of far more import than this, this one might be a bit illustrative. 

Having the “courage” to stand up to Christians and defile Christian traditions and symbols doesn’t actually require any courage… because there’s no danger of anything bad actually happening besides some chastising words from a few of the offended.  No one is going to issue death threats against you, no one is going to put a bounty on your head, mobs of people aren’t going to start riots and kill others because of you, as was shown in 1986 with The Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili and 1987 with Piss Christ, by Andres Serrano. Of course there is another religion where that’s exactly what happens if one were to criticize it or its symbols… but of course those “courageous” artists aren’t assailing that religion.

This is a symbol of the bizarro world we find ourselves living in.  Other things that are counted as courageous today include a man announcing that he’s a woman, flaunting one’s morbid obesity in public or wrapping oneself in the flag of victimization for being black or gay or some other category. 

None of those things takes courage in 2023 America where being anything but a patriotic heterosexual Christian white male accords hero worship. It doesn’t take courage to assail someone or something where there is no threat of consequences. 

Heterosexual Christian white males built most (but not all) of the world we live in today.  It’s far from perfect, but no time or place in history has been perfect.  But it’s not their DNA that somehow makes them better citizens or better people. No, it’s the culture they built.

We’re told that somehow western culture is bad because it was not crafted by a multicultural collective.  That makes no sense.  Virtually every culture in human history has been built by members of a single race.  There were not a lot of whites helping to craft the Mali Empire in Africa, there were not a lot of blacks at the center of the Chinese Middle Kingdom, not a lot of yellow people helping to build the Inca Empire and there weren’t a lot of brown people helping to build Russia or the Russian Empire. No, most of human history has been dominated by monochromatic empires, nations and cultures.

It just happens to be the case that on Earth’s competitive landscape the culture built and developed by straight, Christian white males is the one that has generated the greatest increases in freedom, technology and prosperity in human history.  And it’s not even close.  But because not everyone has shared equally in the material gains from that culture, it must be destroyed…

Because that culture largely focuses on meritocracy, accountability, individual liberty and limited government rather than coercion from above, people who have yet to achieve their desired goals have the opportunity to criticize it with impunity, something they cannot do in most other parts of the world and couldn’t have done throughout most of human history virtually everywhere. Yet without the threat of consequence they often call themselves courageous. 

Western civilization, the driver of said unprecedented levels of freedom and prosperity and opportunity in all of human history, today finds itself under attack by those who have migrated to it, have invaded it or whose ancestors were brought to it, because they’ve not achieved their desired goals. This, despite the fact that conditions back wherever they or their ancestors left from are likely far worse than they are anywhere in the west.  But no matter.  These “protesters” use the freedoms accorded by western culture to attack it.  That’s a problem. No culture can survive if there are no shared values.  No culture can survive if citizens don’t have at least a common appreciation for the nations’ fundamental culture and assume it to be a good thing.   

Here at home, if those criticizing America were just a few outliers there would be no problem.  A strong nation can withstand critique, even from within, and that’s why we have a 1^st Amendment.  The problem in 2023 however is that fully half of the country has been brainwashed into believing that the bedrock principles upon which America is based are somehow evil, corrupt or illegitimate.  They got that way because one of the two main political parties has proffered that lie for decades and enlisted its fellow fabulists in the media, academia and the government to reinforce it.

That is simply not sustainable. Like the movement of art from the classical style of Botticelli, Da Vinci, Rembrandt and Rubins to the self important renderings of Basquiat, Mark Rothco, Robert Mapplethorpe and Glööckler, the transition from the a nation built on universal God given fundamental rights to one based on balkanization and subjective grievances based on “equity” and victimization promises to replace something great with something absurd.  What’s more, that absurd subjective culture cannot long stand.  Just as we’ve seen with the Democrat party since the beginning of the war in Gaza, at some point groups joined by victim status can and will splinter as their various victim classes turn against one another based on the current hierarchy of victim status. 

As we march towards what will be the most consequential presidential election in American history, we might want to start suggesting to those who seek to destroy what “white heterosexual Christian males” have built that they take a look around. They’ll not find a better combination of opportunity, freedom and real equality anywhere on earth or in history, particularly as it relates to protecting minorities.  They should, unlike the Gays for Gaza buffoons we see in the streets, consider what happens to them if they actually get what they wish for. 

Virginity, Failed Marriages and an Almost Perfect Government

How many people marry the first person they ever kiss or date or even have sex with? Not that many. The average age an American loses their virginity is 17 while the average age they get married is 27. Nonetheless, despite a decade in the dating pool, experiencing everything from one night stands to years of living with someone, when people finally take the plunge, half of all US marriages end up in divorce.

There are lots of things that one might take from that observation, but the thing that is most compelling is that despite their best efforts, people are not perfect. They make mistakes. After spending the first 10 years of their adult lives trying to get it right for what is arguably the most important decision of their lives, half the population still gets it wrong and asks for a “do over”. Despite all efforts to make a good decision, half the time we get it wrong. And that’s with everyone involved seeking a common goal!

So the question is: If American adults, with everyone involved seeking to do what’s best, get it wrong half the time, how does our government, with its myriad players promoting conflicting and even mutually exclusive positions, get things right almost all the time?

They don’t, but with the lack of “Do overs” we get with laws and regulations, you’d think they did.  In reality government fails at almost everything they try, but somehow they almost never step back and reevaluate.  Which makes what we’re watching with the debate around the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expires at the end of the year, so compelling.  Enacted in 2008, Section 702 allows the government to collect — without a warrant — emails, text messages and phone calls of foreigners overseas, even when they're talking to Americans.

Many in the GOP suggest it should not be reauthorized or should be neutered as they argue the Justice Department has used it as a fig leaf from behind which they could spy on Americans.  The GOP’s right, but that’s not the point.

Whatever the outcome, this is one of the few times in history that Congress – or anyone else for that matter – gets an opportunity to evaluate the efficacy of a piece of legislation and adjust accordingly.  That’s because most laws go on the books and never come off… regardless of how successful they actually are, or more likely, not.   

Take ethanol mandates… the poster child for zombie government programs that never die - regardless of the damage they do. Since the Carter administration the government has been diverting tax dollars to put ethanol into your gas tank. Initially it was intended to be a tool to help America become energy independent in the face of OPEC embargos, it then morphed into a tool to help increase gas mileage and later it became a critical element in fighting “climate change”. Now it doesn’t even do any of those dubious but theoretically positive, things. It’s simply become another failed government wealth transfer program.

Ethanol is an industry that enjoys no natural market. The only reason the ethanol market exists is because of government mandates. And who are the beneficiaries of this corporate welfare that is funded out of your pocket? You?  Of course not.  No, it’s mainly members of the farm / finance / producers cabal in the form of the Renewable Fuels Association. This ethanol boondoggle translated into a $41 billion industry in 2021 and is expected to grow to $124 billion by 2030, money that comes out of your pocket and could be spent elsewhere if it were not being, literally, set on fire.

The worst part of the entire ethanol fiasco is the fact that not only does it not achieve any of its stated – and oft changing – objectives; it actually causes a wide array of unintended consequences – none of which are good. Number one is the fact that it drives up the cost of one of the most important foodstuffs in the world, corn, the price for which has more than doubled over the last 20 years. That in turn drives up the price of virtually every other thing in the economy, from food to transportation to plastics. Then there’s the fact that ethanol damages engines and that the patchwork of ethanol standards across the country causes unnecessary price spikes and shortages. And if all of that weren’t enough, ethanol drives deforestation around the world and it starves third world populations and harms the environment too! 

But of course there are many other programs that simply fail, yet never go away.  At the top of the list are the many programs of the War on Poverty.  These various programs did nothing to solve the actual problem of poverty, but did generate more than $30 trillion of government spending over a half century and empowered an army of government bureaucrats while redistributing wealth to countless dysfunctional or fraudulent NGOs. 

Then there’s the plethora of other “green energy” programs besides ethanol that fail year in and year out but somehow the Department of Energy continues to fund them.  There’s Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education which has been an abysmal failure. Despite spending tens of billions of dollars annually, American student test scores have barely budged since the department was created in 1980, have been stagnant on the world stage for decades all while the  DOE focuses on resource guides for LGBTQI+ students. And we can’t forget the Border Patrol, which ostensibly exists to protect the nation’s borders but today functions more as a collection of crossing guards for the millions of illegals who walk into the country every year.

If there seems to be a theme here, there is.  The more government tries to do, the more it fails.  And not only fails, but usually makes matters worse. And here’s what makes the 702 debate so potentially intriguing, the potential for Congress to actually do its job, to evaluate how effectively the Executive Branch is spending the money it allocates, uses the power it gives them and at the end of the day, achieves the goals it lays out. 

A MAGA led Congress in 2025 should apply 702’s lessons and across the federal government.  They should propose a Constitutional Amendment that states that all federal laws have an implicit sunset provision of 10 years unless it passes each house of Congress by at least 60%. It would also stipulate that all federal regulations would sunset after 10 years, regardless of the margin of passage of the underlying law. The effect of this Amendment would be a greatly diminished the number of zombie like federal regulations that never die, regardless of their cost, efficacy or unintended consequences. Each sub 60% law would have to be re-authorized each decade.

The most obvious impact of this change would be that politicians and bureaucrats would no longer be able to spin yarns about milk and honey without any accountability. (Which is why this idea will likely never see the light of day…) At the time of reconsideration, each sub 60% bill (or every regulation) would have a decade’s worth of hard data to analyze, making it far more difficult to hoodwink the public with rosy scenarios that have no basis in reality. The beauty of this proposal is that it would force legislators and regulators to defend a law’s actual results rather than opine on its promised virtues. Given that most government programs cost more than projected, rarely work as promised, and often have significant unintended consequences, a decade should be a long enough time to inflict any law or regulation on the country and her citizens.