Make America GTA Again
Degenerate Social Justice
I’m reading the autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt. It’s another America altogether. It feels like watching Braveheart. I understand it perfectly, but the difference is that Roosevelt was the smartest man in the room. He was honest. He stood up for the common man. He spoke for the trees. He understood the persistence of bullies and the corruption of rich and powerful men. He was a fighter, a fair fighter who loved fair fighters. You can hear the pride he had in his best appointees. You could smell the contempt he had for slackers.
By the time I became President I had grown to feel with deep intensity of conviction that governmental agencies must find their justification largely in the way in which they are used for the practical betterment of living and working conditions among the mass of the people. I felt that the fight was really for the abolition of privilege; and one of the first stages in the battle was necessarily to fight for the rights of the workingman.
Any man who shirked his work, who dawdled and idled, received no mercy; slackness is even worse than harshness; for exactly as in battle mercy to the coward is cruelty to the brave man, so in civil life slackness towards the vicious and idle is harshness towards the honest and hardworking.
Theodore Roosevelt. The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt (p. 509). (Function). Kindle Edition.
This was his attitude towards slack federal enforcement of the 8 hour workday. The states weren’t getting it done. Can you imagine it? It’s hard to imagine in today’s America, which reads like Nellie Bowles’ observation from The Free Press:
If you wonder why people freaked out so much about The Free Press post-acquisition, it’s because the entire mainstream media works in lockstep to present a very specific set of half-truths to its viewers and readers. And we’re just not doing that distortion, or at least not actively trying to. And that upsets them greatly. The movement believes a lie is sometimes for your own good, and in fact, you need to be blanketed in the lie. You need to be told the lie over and over, in every blog and on every channel, by every writer and every talking head. Flip the channel and find it again, in the newspapers, the wire services, all together, until you believe in your bones that the lie is the truth. And if one channel or one blog might differ, well, that is appalling to the movement. They obsess over it. It cannot stand. But here we are, still standing, baby!
Also, not to rant too much (too late) but this is how the conspiratorial podcast world has risen so fast. Because once people realize how much the mainstream media lies to them, it’s hard not to assume everything is a lie. Maybe everything is a conspiracy. And boom, you’re cooked, you’re Alex Jones, you’re in Candy Land.
Anyway, there’s an iconic image of a cop, Chief Aaron Edwards, leaping over a barricade to throw himself on the suspected bomb-thrower. TGIF salutes Chief Aaron. A hero among cowards. Me, I was right behind him, about to jump in there, just out of frame, gearing up.
Petty, petty Americans. Slackers and cowards. I swear to god I watched 2 minutes of a TV show last night called Laid, which is the story of a shitty, pretty, petty person who is finding out all of her lovers are dying. The dialog is scatological, casual and pornographic at the same time.
It occurred to me, as I read Smoking Jars of Metal along with the following propaganda just after Theodore Roosevelt, that millions Americans have adopted and perfected degenerate social justice.
It doesn’t insult their intelligence because they suspect that the most intelligent people are either worthless obscure nerds or world class grifters. But most of the mainstream media and social media are awash with pretty, petty, shitty people doing nasty things to the beat.
Everybody wants to be rich and powerful
Everybody wants to be famous and sexy
Everybody’s full of shit today
How could it be any other way?
Degenerate Social Justice
Here’s the formula. Since you believe everybody is full of shit, you need for society to put up with it. There are no honest and hardworking majorities in this slimy democracy because everybody wants likes, including the all of the shitty Congress, who don’t seem to age out. So get your backsheesh because everyone is full of shit. Let the people who are full of shit off the hook. The only ones who are not full of shit live in the rainforest, but they all really want to live where they can have their own TV series. That’s social justice. Give the shittiest people equity, because we’re all shitty.
So the mouthpieces of the Western world crawl all over America’s toilet bowls on a never-ending quest for exposing shitty racists, shitty fascists, shitty homophobes, islamophobes, transphobes, and especially those snot-nosed uppity people who resent our collective shitness. Like anybody is authentic and good. Of course we’re all full of shit, but at least we’re not rich and powerful .. except we are compared to the wretched of the earth, but we understand that we’re complicit in our white supremacy and all guilty as compared to the Others.
Sounds like global intifada to me. Smells like shit.
Sorry, I’m with George Carlin on this calling shit out as shit rather than ‘poo’. Euphemisms are for the Ministry of Truth.
Suicidal Empathy
Most gamers on Planet America agree that Rockstar is the studio that makes the bangingest videogames anywhere. Sometime this Christmas season they are going to release their twerking Miami masterpiece Grand Theft Auto Six. One of its stars that you get to Avatar into is something of an ex-convict badass girlboss. My nickel wager is that in the sex scenes, she’ll mostly be on top, because in that Karen fantasy twist on the genuine tender spunk of Cyndi Lauper, girls just wanna, they just wanna. Fill in your truth here. Be authentically shitty and pretty.
What will be on display is representative of the most advanced of Western inventions, from dynamite to aircraft to skyscrapers to digital tech all laid at the feet of juvenile minded criminals whose quote is “It’s just who you know and what you got.”
As David Bowie said decades ago:
Fame, it's not your brain, it's just the flame
That burns your change to keep you insane
Is it any wonder so many believe we are little more than what we consume? Is it any wonder that the religious get regressive and the atheists get aggressive? There is no law, there is only oppression, right? All force is immoral, right? Only when we buy into the suicide pact with degeneracy. Only when we decide that everything is boring except living on the edge.
GTA6 is delayed six months. I have to believe it must be because somewhere in their plot line they had some billionaire on an island, and our two anti-heroes entertain a stereotypical Fantasy Island scenario. “But he’s so connected, if we take him down the world will implode..” That’s not some full cycle irony. That’s where all degeneracy ends up, that same toilet. Except there are some of us who don’t enjoy splashing in it. We have never been woke.
Like most people living on the topside of the proverbial rocks, I played Rockstar’s previous games. San Andreas, the blocky one in the tweet from the White House (jeezuz!) became depressing as hell after a short period of time. All you do is curse, steal and run from cops. The next version, taking place in NYC was a technical marvel, and it was beautiful in the same way Goodfellas is. The last one, GTA5 introduced open-ended capers and multiple avatars to play to give the narrative multiple POVs. Truly memorable characters. It was more Sopranos-ish, which meant you didn’t mind cheering for the bad guy who stepped over the line because he’s genuinely fighting for his life trying to keep up appearances. But HBO’s Sopranos formula was 1999, people. Since then we have been progressively buried in edgy countercultural narrative slop. Now the lowlife seeks a ghetto fabulous high life. They’re pretty!
Focus, Beauty and Embracing the Suck
What an unfortunate plurality don’t quite understand is that there are eternal virtues, ethical practices and valuable work that are always worth learning and doing. These folks have become functionally sociopathic. They have just enough outward virtue-signaling or rule-following to pass as normal, but no actual virtues operate when personal cost or temptation appears. They collapse into shit eating expediency, cowardice and betrayal the moment anything real is at stake. This is not rooted in ideological extremism, but in character deficiency and the scarcity of actual justice in our society. Moreover, we voted for such people to represent us.
We, all too many of us, have lost our backbones. We have become squishy to the point of moral illiteracy. We suffer the mobs of amoral zombies. They’re everywhere, and they run fast, but they don’t run far. That takes too much focus and endurance. They are blind to beauty so that must be our solace.
I can’t quote Milton or Chaucer and I don’t remember much from the Faerie Queene. Like I’ve said, I had no idea when I chose Science that the Humanities would become so vulnerable. I remember the first of these lines from highschool, and I have never had a boss who knew them. Did you?
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
There’s no speedmetal two-pedal bass drum for that. No rhymed couplets for robot walks and headspins that go along in 4/4 time for the kiddies. It would have been nice for the successor to Ella Fitzgerald to be singing that now at what remains of The Crescendo on Sunset Strip. I no longer escape to the future. I remember what I actually learned in the past. Like Feynman says, these are hard won lessons of practitioners with the actual discipline.
So I leave you with a doubled down appreciation for the genius that was, a renewed disgust for the slop that persists, and an alert for the signpost ahead that says gird your loins. There are still people in this world who appreciate courage and fortitude. We’re not all petty. We’re not all shitty. We’re not all pretty. We are here and we’re sticking to the hard won facts. Justice can still prevail, even against the zombie clowns.
Have a brave heart. Next week we should remember St Patrick didn’t have to chase the snakes out, but we do.
Yeah, this speaks to me. Great piece.
Beware the Ides of March