Letter #211: Cultural Flatulence

The devil's hot air.

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Dad,

I don’t mean to be vulgar, but I can’t help thinking of this antisemitic bilge that’s welling up around us as a kind of cultural flatulence. Come to think of it, I do mean to be vulgar. Because what we’re dealing with is the civilizational equivalent of a wet fart.

Here’s what I think happened. The self-anointed opinion-havers of the West betrayed us all. They made their bread in choking us with ugly lies. They told us men were villains and women were men. They spat on the graves of our national heroes and tore down the monuments to their greatness.

They mocked and cursed and punished the working poor; they kept the lower classes just as ignorant, resentful, and drug-hungry as they possibly could until the country nearly went up in flames while they cheered. They did all that and more, these anchors and writers and elegant tastemakers, these sultans grown fat on their own lies.

Their kingdom is coming apart now, by God’s good grace. But in the process we have all gotten used to living in a situation where speaking basic truth feels like a daring act of rebellion against the accepted narrative, because for a long time it was.

This creates a subtle danger, a little fissure for Satan to hook his claws in. If to speak basic truth is to contradict the accepted narratives, it doesn’t follow that to contradict the accepted narratives is to speak basic truth.

In the wake of the last century’s two great wars, America led the West in declaring that the developed world should be safe for Jews. The fact that everyone involved was human, that their knowledge was partial and their motives mixed, does nothing to diminish the noble virtue of the aspiration. The postwar world was juster for it, and more humane. It was a good and hard-won consensus that said “never again.”

And that’s the worst thing of all about the cloud of lies we’ve been living in. It has made even good and hard-won consensus look suspect. It has given a veneer of legitimacy to the most idiotic malice, so long as it’s “transgressive”—as if obvious falderal like the blood libel or the Scofield Bible conspiracy deserved some kind of a hearing alongside serious thought.

These sorts of paranoid ravings don’t even rise to the level of argument; they are the intellectual equivalent of the slop that puckers around your shower drain after you wash your hair. But the people who trade in them can now pretend to be victims of small-minded censorship because they’re “just asking questions.”

Well, as my friend Seth Barron said to me recently: I have no problem with people asking questions, if they show any interest in learning the answers. Otherwise it’s just a fetid rush of pent-up hot air bursting out as a byproduct of old pressures loosening—you know, like a big, wet, fart.

Love,
Spencer