"There are certain overriding societal changes that bring up disturbing questions about our culture. It comes at us from every direction... music, where (like the recent anti-western music thread) people find basic feelings of family, love, country, religion, and other things along those lines as corny, ignorant, and simplistic. It's all a carefully orchestrated sham the "sophisticated" critics claim.
I am not a musician. I do not have the sophistication to know what drives music today or where it is going. I know what music I like.
"We see it in film, where the general philosophy regarding REALITY is dark and gritty. The implicit message the American movie industry conveys is that the only choices open to us are being "realistic" or upholding moral values -- not both. I call it the art vs. entertainment dichotomy, where "serious" and artistic films (like independent movies) tend to depict man as shallow, ignorant, ugly, and doomed... while happiness, basic values, and decency mostly resides in the mainstream popcorn flicks (because they aren't really artistic or "real"). Cinema reflects the basic false ethical alternative offered by our culture... we can be hard-nosed realists and dismiss morality as irrelevant, melodramatic or intolerant -- or we can take a leap of faith and accept moral rules pertaining only to some fairytale (and commercial) realm."
I am not a film critic and cannot guess at the greatness or otherwise of modern film. I know what I call a good movie when I see it. What the intentions, sensibilities, and artistic vision is modern film is I do not feel qualified to say.
"If we need to alter the basic image of Superman because he is "a big blue Boy Scout," i.e., a morally pure hero, then we are in greater internal danger than any we face externally. A free society fighting for its existence against religious fascists (or any serious issue or threat that can cause society harm) needs to know that good exists, that it's possible for world's freest country to represent it well, and that it can and should triumph over evil. The modern preference for antiheroes represents a collapse into cynicism at the precise moment we need moral certainty most."
Beyond good and evil there is Truth, in my opinion, and it is its truthfulness that makes it powerful. I fear not the loss of truth in the war of good and evil because these truths are transcended in higher understanding. They arise out of a dualistic delusion and dissolve into unity with realization.
"Deconstruction is the rage, even in archiecture, being the profoundly anti-intellectual notion--promulgated, of course, by the intellectuals--that every idea is just a smokescreen for some hidden agenda, that ideas must be "deconstructed," distorted and quarantined within an attitude of snide irony. Deconstruction is the philosophy of undermining every truth, every moral ideal, every intellectual or artistic standard, by turning it into a mean-spirited joke."
The preservation or loss of value in society has no meaning for me because we have our being only in love. Hope and hopelessness dissolve with the appearance of ones own true being. The struggle to preserve the good, the depression of hopelessness are all the result of illusion. The Truth is and can't ever not be.
"This, from a book I read recently, sums it up nicely: "The architecture of deconstruction is part of a culture of nihilism that is the climax and end-product of the past century's trends in art--from 1917, when Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal upside down and hung it on the wall of an art gallery--to 1952, when John Cage passed off four minutes and 33 seconds of silence as a work of music--to the end of 2001, when London's Tate Gallery awarded its prestigious Turner Prize to a room containing only a single light bulb that turned on and off at random intervals, a disconcerting effect used previously only in the torture chambers of Third World dictatorships.""
The destruction of everything is fine by me because what is left is what can't be destroyed and that is the truth of which I speak. False hope and hopelessness are all one in the same, illusions. The answer lies in being what you have always been, how you were before words and ideas, a naked wonderful little monkey with capacities about which we have not yet even begun to dream.
"This trend is wider than any particular school of art or any particular political ideology. It is about whether we take art, ideas and life seriously in the first place. It's our basic view of man and existence. What today's intellectual and artistic avant-garde wants is to break down any belief in ideas, morality and standards. It's a prescription for societal suicide. This Age of Irony has given birth to a mongrel culture of cold, detached pessimism, sarcasm, and cynicism. There is little room for idealistic views of man as capable, intelligent, and noble anymore..."
The nobility of man does not depend on belief. Belief is just that, a religion, a limited view, a straight jacket as to what is right and wrong. The nobility of man is and can never be lost. It is what we are and have always been. There is no struggle or war to be fought for. All that is needed is to let go of everything you were ever taught. The idealist must drop his ideals and the cynic his negativity. Each is welded to each as if his or her life were at stake. Hehe, there is only love.
"Romanticism is Dead."
But in its place is something so much better.