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The Confessions of St. Fred
I am done for, and damned. Yes, a poor sinner who has strayed from the path of righteousness, and now sits brooding over a bottle of Padre Kino, Mexican rust-remover marauding as red wine, for I have done the unpardonable: I have said–I cringe with shame–that some cultures are superior to others.
It gnaws my soul.
Please don’t misjudge me. I am in most respects a good American. I have nothing against brainless, passive-aggressive, narcissistic sanctimony, nor preening academic mediocrity, nor intellectual vacuity. No. I tell you, I love all of these things. I am devoted to our traditions. I believe to the roots of my teeth that bovine complacency is the bedrock of democracy. Indeed, the only criticism I can make of our national intellectual life is that it would embarrass a microcephalic box-turtle.
Oh god. Wait. I didn’t mean to imply that microcephalic box-turtles are in any way inferior. They are just otherly abled. I apologize, and acknowledge my Vertebrate Privilege.
Source: http://freenorthcarolina.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-confessions-of-st-fred.html
This guy, whoever he is, is a pompous gasbag trying his very best to masquerade as an intellectual – he sounds like his role model was William F. Buckley, another renown gasbag(I wonder does this guy’s eyes wiggle like Buckley’s did). But there’s much more to being an intellectual than trying to sound witty and filling an essay with 17th Century sentence constructions. Intellect requires the ability to think in insightful rather than pedestrian terms.
He asks the question, for example, “Exactly how is a pack of nekkid savages in the rain forests of Papua-New Guinea, who eat weird pasty white grubs and each other, who speak a language consisting of seven word none of which means anything, who have never even heard of Carlos Santana—how could they possibly be the equals of Europeans who brush their teeth and wrote Hamlet’s soliloquy?”
That question alone betrays his inability to think on anything other than a pedestrian level. He doesn’t have the insight to recognize that all cultures adapt to their environment, and he’s making the erroneous assumption that the European culture that resulted from a motive of greed and senselessly vulgar consumption is superior to a simpler existence. What evidence does he have of that?
If I’m not mistaken, I think the people of the culture that he tries to dispose of with such hubristic condescension rarely suffer from high blood pressure, ulcers, or die of heart attacks. So can we say with any real validity that a culture that contributes to such somatic ravages is superior? In addition, while it is true that the “savages” that he refers to undoubtedly live a simpler life, their life style doesn’t threaten ALL life on the planet. So from a simple perspective of viable conduct, who is more enlightened, and who are the idiots?
If the writer was a true intellectual instead of a pompously arrogant gasbag, he would have considered such questions. He would have also considered that when we engage in the kind of lifestyle that “those savages” live, we have a phrase for it – we call it a vacation.
Wattree