Our Enemies Wait As We Destroy Ourselves
Russia waits, no longer ideological, but moving slowly and gingerly toward the Christian heritage that once made her a nation, even as we stupidly toss our own culture away.
By Anthony Esolen
November 30, 2021
Is the United States becoming like the old Soviet Union in a way that people fail to see because of the noise and the distractions of electoral politics, mass entertainment masking as news, and mass indoctrination masking as entertainment?
We are becoming a meritocracy that punishes merit and rewards folly. We have all the disutility of a meritocracy—the snobbishness, the restless ambition, the inclination to see merit only in what can be measured or paid for; even the tendency to pull intelligent people out of their native regions and set them down, like gilded tumbleweeds, in places without memory or character. But we get none of the benefits. We punish truth-telling and intelligence, and reward stupidity.
We are an idiocracy.
Perhaps I am being a bit unfair to the Soviets. They still had the Bolshoi Ballet. The Soviets did not bury all their great novelists: you would not win any points sneering at Tolstoy, as you might now in the United States if you sneered at Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, or Mark Twain. I am looking at a photograph of a Russian sports parade in Moscow. In front are some hundreds of skinny teenage boys, stripped to the waist, wearing boxing gloves, and looking as if they are ready to take on the world for Mother Russia and beat it to a pulp. They want to win.
more
https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/30/our-enemies-wait-as-we-destroy-ourselves/
