Do I Amuse You?

I hope so, because increasingly, it’s all I got. Research and scholarship are too hard. But being myself is easy. For me, anyway. Nor was it always this way. I want to say that for men in particular, they are generally driven to conquer or accomplish something; to do or create or know something. And even then, mostly to score with the ladies. 

But darn it, there are a few of us whose vocation is simply to be: to abide. Abiding is not for the sake of anything else, rather, only itsoph. 

On the one hand, I can’t expect anyone else to be interested in my being out loud every morning. On the other, if I can help some coongenital vertical slacker discover that he too is called to Be, and to have the courage to be so, then that’s enough. A vertical influencer. Or stand-up metaphysician. If not me, then who? At any rate, that's what I want to be. Only without trying.

On to the post. 

Why is the Republican Party so adept at exerting force upon solid, liquid, or gaseous substances, and drawing them into the mouth via a partial vacuum created through reduced air pressure? 

Regarding this incessant suction, Andrew Breitbart suggested that a big reason has to do with the principle that politics is downstream from culture. Obviously, the left controls the culture and all its organs, and gravity takes care of the rest. And what it can’t control it simply kills — e.g., comedy, art, intellect, and good taste more generally.

Okay, but from what is culture downstream? Etymology provides a clue: cult. Beneath every culture is the deeper structure of cult.

Which is what, exactly? Let’s first begin with culture, which has many meanings, but this will do:

the total pattern of human behavior and its products embodied in thought, speech, action, and artifacts and dependent upon man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations through the use of tools, language, and systems of abstract thought.

Whew. One could say even more, but the larger point is that culture is almost everything humans think, say, make, and do. What does the word leave out, if anything? 

Well, “nature,” for starters. However, secular culture also ends there, in that it can acknowledge nature but denies supernature -- you could say it is a cult defined by pretending not to be one.

This cult is increasingly defined by the denial of nature as well, but in reality, this inevitably follows from the prior denial of the transnatural. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that nature is already supernatural, or we could never know it. 

But what was once obvious is now forbidden to notice. When the left talks about “separation of church and state,” they certainly don’t mean their church. But they do mean the separation of intellect from nature. Indeed, if intellect isn’t separate from nature, then men can’t be women and a senile president can't control the weather. 

Like culture, cult has many definitions, including a religious practice, worship; and a system of beliefs and ritual connected with the worship of a deity, a spirit, or a group of deities or spirits. But the cult of the left is a tricksy one, in that it has all the forms of religion but deprived of the substance. 

The real substance, of course, is and must be supernatural. If it is reduced to nature, then it redounds to pagan pantheism or earth worship. And as the Aphorist says,

After experiencing what an age practically without religion consists of, Christianity is learning to write the history of paganism with respect and sympathy.

I’m old enough to remember when the left was pagan instead of not even pagan:

When he is stripped of the Christian tunic and the classical toga, there is nothing left of the European but a pale-skinned barbarian.

And here we are. But even barbarians have religion, since barbarism is just another mode of humanness. Nor does the left represent barbarism in the raw, but rather, a rebarbarization -- as what happened when the Hun decided to throw off the oppressive crust of Christianity for the glory of Wotan. Good times. 

Come to think of it -- but this would take us too far afield -- we’re still very much living in the wreckage of what happened when Germany decided to go Wotan on the world in 1914. But I’m not a historian, I just live in history. Sometimes, anyway. Thankfully, there’s always a way out, for

We cannot escape the triviality of existence through the doors, but rather through the roofs.

Everyone talks about pollution, but ignores the most important kind, for  

The waters of the West are stagnant, but the spring is unpolluted.

Nevertheless, 

We all have a key to the door that opens to the luminous and noble peace of the desert. 

Even so, 

Men tend not to inhabit any but the ground floor of their souls, and tend toward superficially like a cork toward the surface.

Am I bedithering again? My point is to proceed from Breitbart’s Law to Gagdad’s Suggestion, and declare that the cult of the left is downstream from religion. Or ultimately that culture and cult are posterior to metaphysics. And yes, we will tie this all together with the other subjects we’ve been discussing. Somehow. Just not today.