Farewell to the Last Golden Age

Blogger is in the process of stealing my past.

Maybe they will give it back, but I am looking forward to being informed that it wasn't really my past to begin with.

Anyway on to Ben Shapiro Boy Prognosticator. This week he's reviewing Mel Gibson's new movie, which he finds offensive. Not because of the excessive violence and gore, but because it implies that American Civilization might not last forever. Even worse it claims that our fears might undermine the things that make this society great. He's offended at this suggestion because, of course, that's what actually happening, and with Shapiros full support. We pissed away Habeas Corpus, our Privacy, our national honor, the Geneva Convention in the pursuit of safety in the face of al-Qaeda. We were told by the Bush Administration that giving up these things was necessary to protect us.

So naturally Shapiro is looking for a different culprit for the decline of civilization. And he's found one - Mel Gibson!

"Apocalypto" opens with a quotation from historian Will Durant: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it destroys itself from within." Durant is correct -- but the film's exposition of dreamt is utterly wrong. If American (and Western) civilization falls, it will not be because our fears drove us to "ma'am barbarities," but because, like Gibson, we failed to distinguish good from evil.

. . . It is the violence Gibson does to morality that should worry us. It is that violence that contributes to the internal destruction of Western civilization. If Western civilization is doomed to failure, it will not be despite Mel gibbousness best efforts, it will be because of them.

I have noticed that we as a nation do have a hard time telling good from evil. For example at one point if you had asked if jamming flashlights up civilians butts was good or bad, you would have had most people saying that it was bad. These days people compare that to a fraternity prank.

In the old days if you had asked if starting a war on false premises was a good or bad thing, most people would have answered bad. Now people create huge billows of smoke to keep us from answering that question.

Yeah young Ben is right there do seem to be a lot of people who don't know right from wrong, and it's not despite Ben shapers best efforts that we are this way, it's, in small part, because of them.