| | When, millennia from now, the great-grandchildren of today's barbarians study the remaining fragments of our Ancient Eglish literature, will V•DAVIS•HANSON be our Tacitus?
Given thirty years of postmodern relativism in our universities, we were bound to get a postmodern president at some point. . . . “After modernism” or “beyond modernism” can mean almost anything — nihilistic art that goes well beyond modern art (think a crucifix in urine rather than the splashes of modernist Jackson Pollock). Or think of the current English Department doggerel that is declared “poetry” (no transcendent references, echoes of classicism, no cadence, rhyme, meter, particular poetic language, theme, structure, etc.) versus Eliot’s or Pound’s non-traditional modern poetry of the 1920s and 1930. In politics, there is something of the absurd. The modern age saw life and death civil rights marches and the commemoration of resistance to venomous racial oppression; the postmodern civil rights marches are staged events at the DC tea party rally, as elites troll in search of a slur, or Prof. Gates’s offer to donate his “cuffs” to the Smithsonian as proof of his racial “ordeal.”
more Victor Davis Hanson
(Edited by Ted Keer on 4/05, 8:30pm)
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