CULTURAL DECAY

Fred should see the roll down gates and barred windows in West Philly to confirm his description of a culture in decay.

Surrender in the Culture Wars

It All Over, Don´t it?

September, 5, 2013

 By Fred Reed

http://www.fredoneverything.net/

How the hell did it happen?

I lived, 1951 to 1956, aged six to eleven, in the  Arlington suburbs of Washington and, ´56 to´57, in smalltown Athens, Alabama,  and eighth grade through high school in rural King George County, Virginia, graduating in 1964. Another  country. Another world. What happened?

The  Arlington of then was entirely white, peopled largely by men several years back  from World War Two, enjoying the fantastic surge in prosperity following the  war. The dominant culture, the only culture, was that of Reader´s Digest, clean  cut, honest, and confident. We watched the Mousketeers, all soap and good manners.  We joined the Boy Scouts, and were told to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly,  courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. We  were, at least sorta, most of those. Pornography meant monitoring the advance  of Annette Funicello´s bustline.

At age eight  I walked every morning the perhaps six blocks to Robert E. Lee Elementary  School, alone. Why not? There was nothing to be afraid of. My friends and I  rode to Westover, the shopping center on Washington Boulevard, and left our  bikes on the sidewalk for hours while we read comic books in the drug store.  Why not? Nobody stole bikes.  My family  never locked the doors of the house. Why should we? There weren´t any burglars.

And in  summer evenings thirty kids, girls and boys, played hide-and-seek across  several blocks, and parents didn´t give it a thought. Why should they? It was  safe. We were the dominant culture, the only culture, and we didn´t do  pederasty, engage in gang attacks, or muggings, or drive fast on kid-littered  streets. It wasn´t our way. If we had suffered a natural disaster, no one would  have looted. It wasn´t what we did.

I´m not sure  what would have happened if a gang of high-schoolers had robbed a candy store.  It was impossible, because we didn´t do such things. A child molester? I don´t  know. It would have one way or another been a case of God help him and he never  would have been seen again. The culture didn´t tolerate child molesters.

And now, and  now….

And now I  read daily of armed police patrolling the halls of schools, of parents walking  their kids to school because children aren´t safe by themselves, of metal  detectors at the doors, of flash mobs of, er, teens robbing stores. Instead of  homogeneity we have diversity, which means you have to buy a new bicycle twice  a year. Leave on unattended for ten minutes, and it disappears.

How did we  get here? Why do we put up with it? Bastardy in this white, once civilized  society is now said to be at thirty percent: A middle class with a slum morality.  You have to be crazy to leave your keys in an open car, which we once regularly  did. There was no reason not to.

The answer  of course is that the post-war culture is no longer dominant. When all of a population  agree that certain things are not acceptable, such as assaults, looting, mob  robberies, and thievery, they don´t happen. After those horrendous tidal waves  hit Japan, there was no looting. It isn´t part of Japanese culture. After riots  in America, after Katrina, there was and is massive looting. The culture no  longer enforces it standards of behavior.

A virtue of  a dominant culture is that it doesn’t have to be imposed. It polices itself.  During my five years in rural Virginia, we all had guns. The substantial number  of blacks in the county had guns. Nobody ever shot anybody else, either on  purpose or accidentally. It wasn´t something we did. It wasn´t in the culture. White  or black.

When the  dominant culture doesn´t condone crime, there will be very little crime. This  is why the European-American constitution of Tom Jefferson could specify trial  by jury. A jury trial takes a lot of time and effort, which a society can  afford only when there is little crime. Today we have trial by plea bargain  because jury trials for our rate of crime would have the entire country  empanelled constantly.

In Arlington,  and Athens, and King George, we had close to no policemen. That´s how many  policemen we needed. We behaved well because it never occurred to us that we  might do otherwise. As kids we drank beer illegally, ignored speed limits, and  some of us shot an occasional deer out of season—but that was it. We didn´t  rape, kill, rob, or assault teachers because it wasn´t in the culture. The  dominant whites did not beat the blacks into comas, nor vice versa.

Fear of  punishment had little to do with it. We might get into a fist fight, but we  didn´t pick up a brick or a length of rebar. There were things we just didn´t  do. Had one of us said “Fuck you” to a teacher, the entire moral weight of the  county would have fallen on him.

This is why  as cultures break down, or mix with less civilized cultures, more and more  police become necessary. So do locks, bars, alarms, cameras and, for the  remaining virile, carry permits. Hello.

Here is one  reason why multiculturalism seldom works. Suppose that one culture has a strong  work ethic, fairly strict sexual morality, low illegitimacy, low crime, respect  for study and proper use of the national language. Suppose that another culture  is precisely opposite, or approximately opposite, as for example the Moslems in  France. If the first group is truly dominant, and imposes its standards—you will  do your homework, kid—the second group may successfully assimilate.

But suppose  that the dominant group isn´t really that dominant and can´t, or won´t, impose  its values. How—in a school, say—do you mix the toilet-mouthed with the  well-spoken, girls who expect to marry before giving birth with fifteen year  old single mothers pushing strollers into class? Or if the courts have decided  that “motherfucker· is an entire language to itself, and that eradication of  the word would constitute imperial culture-abuse? The effect will always be to  lower the civilized group to the uncivilized.

Here we are,  and there is no turning back. All that made the old culture what it was is now  held to be elitism, sin most dreadful, and all that we held to be wrong is now  said to be “authentic,” whatever that means, or else the consequence of  ineluctable social forces.

Buy the  ticket, take the ride.