* RADIO RANT: Symptoms of Society

There is an unconscious Zeitgeist working among the young, a general intuition that not only is Western Civilization no longer "quite right," but the planet itself is in dire straits.Last night [4/23/07] Michael Savage brought up a news story about a fellow who lopped off his own penis in a London public venue—which Savage perceived as a literal manifestation of a larger "truth," that is, support for his own frequent harangue against contemporary Britain as emasculated, as a pathetic after-lingering of a once great (because macho-aggressive) Empire. Well, from a postcolonial point of view, I'd consider this a good thing!? But I have to admit that Savage does perform, at times, some intriguing figurative thinking of this sort.

But what does he see, then, in Columbine and VA Tech? What do these events "say" about us Americans? Cho's ethnicity aside (though Savage can never let that be), Savage's answer has been predictable: these slaughters are symptomatic, of course, of an over-liberal/indulgent society going to hell in a handcart, bereft of any solid religious and moral grounding. (But again, I even consider this current relativistic "plight" to be a good thing, by and large, at least in contrast to a monocultural theocracy.) And yet I'd still read the school-shootings phenomenon only slightly differently, in a more "ecological" fashion, if you will. (Think lemmings.) I believe that there is an unconscious Zeitgeist working among the young, a general intuition that not only is Western Civilization no longer "quite right," but the planet itself is in dire straits. What future, then? Ergo a pandemic turn to depressant drugs, suicide, school shootings—violence directed both inward and outward, towards a "thinning out" of a "botched" species? This despair may even be exemplified in our retreatist last-gasp immersion in the virtual realities of the web and video games. . . . Hmmm: at last, my reading may be even more pessimistic than Savage's.

The very thought of pessimism, by the way, always makes me think of Schopenhauer—who would put all this yap about British & American "character" in its proper perspective (Quot. of the Day):

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country.
    --Schopenhauer