"Relentless smirking and snickering"
By One day, I am confident that Victor Davis Hanson will come clean and admit that he’s actually a member of the Situationist International and that his entire career was an elaborate ruse intended to make people who study Teh Classics looks like buffoons. When that day arrives, we will look back on posts like this and realize that the signs were there all along:
And when you compare the relentless smirking and snickering of a David Letterman or Bill Mahr [sic] with past variety hosts of the 1950s, or TV shows like Desperate Housewives or Sex in the City with Bonanza or Paladin, then we get a good glimpse of the rapid devolution to a postmodern society. Not that we don’t have genius and flair in our midst, but the gap reminds me a lot of the change in temperament of a Juvenal or Petronius compared to an earlier generation of Horace and Virgil. While Trimalchio and his bunch argue over stuffed song birds and dancing catamites, some legionary is on the Rhine or Danube holding back the tide.
As for myself, I don’t think I’ve used the phrase “postmodern society” with a straight face — how postmodern of me! — since the spring of 1994. But if we’re worried about what kinds of sneers and snickers foretell the collapse of Western Civilization, perhaps these will do:
(1) “If [Padilla is] insane, can’t they just dress him up in a clownsuit and execute him? He won’t know the difference…”
(2) “A big day for Jose is having a root canal done.”
(3) “Padilla dehumanized himself. Convicted of aggravated assault as a gangbanger even before he became an ‘enlightened terrorist’, Padilla left the human race and became a predatory animal long before he went into custody as an enemy combatant.”
(4) “The photo shown indicates a man’s feet sticking out from a cell, a beastly torture if I ever saw one, imagine, his feet! What kind of nation have we become? Although it is possible his guards, Dick Durbin’s SS models, were about to put leg irons on him but never mind. Until Abdullah is transferred to Trump Towers I’m going on a hunger strike, for solidarity’s sake.”