When Did The American Cultural Rot Begin?

Look around this society, this culture. It's bad. Not terminal, but bad. Best case scenario? It's gonna get a lot worse before it gets better.

For we Catholics, at the center of American culturally conservative life, the effect has been profound. Old verities shattered. New guesses shot full of trendy psychobabble and hatred of venerable traditions. 

How did we get here? When did it start? When did the cultural masochism begin? When did the core of America, from the elites to the plebs, start to rot from the inside? It began, in earnest, in the 1960s.

There were signs before that. Liberal appeasement of the Soviets. Art that perverted beauty. A growing distance between the values of the city and the country. Up until the mid-60s these issues were manageable. Look at the Steely Dan song 'IGY' and the future it assumes as of 1957. It's bright and progress is always beneficial. Well, history and the immediate future had other ideas.

The JFK murder, Vietnam, and LBJ's national suicide attempt vis a vis his social policies all played their part in what I term "The Great Unraveling." However, the tipping point was the abrogation of adult responsibility in response to the challenge of scruffy coddled youth.

We see it today, as Nazi students run roughshod over pusillanimous Ivy League administrators. In the 60s pro-communist students of the same general ilk were crowned as idealistic and noble by middle-aged liberals terrified of being thought of as squares. 

Matters once thought taboo to a civilized people became the proposed norms. Behavior not tolerated by a nation run by grownups was championed by the emerging countercultural consensus. The mainline Protestant churches lost their minds and went Bolshie, while our own Church withstood attacks from within and without. 

After the 60s the putrid ideas of the radical students and their enablers began their long march through the institutions, as one-time fans of the Viet Cong got tenure and spread their poison across the humanities and intellectual society writ large.

What we see now, a celebration of cultural barbarity and downward mobility, the poddle-like neuroses of the elite, intellectual cowardice in the face of the supporters of Hamas, and national leadership by a senile drugged up hack all have their genesis in the glory of 'IGY' turned dark and twisted by entitled brats and their fellow travelers. 

Is recovery possible? Yes. But it will take an exceedingly loud wake up call to do it. You'd have thought 9-11 would have done the job. Nah, the usual suspects blamed it on American imperialism, as the evil and the gullible blame the Israelis for the Hamas attack. 

That's like blaming those dangerous warships sitting at dock in Pearl Harbor for December 7th 1941. Oh, and then holding Americans solely responsible for the Doolittle Raid, ignoring the Pearl Harbor attack. To make matters even more absurd, we should show a kind and solicitous sympathy for the psychological boo boo inflicted upon the pilots of the Imperial Japanese Navy, the poor dears traumatized by their flight over our Pacific Fleet. 

As such we, as Americans and as Catholics, may have to undergo a severe test and a great sacrifice if we are to recover our national will and a truly enlightened culture. Let us thus once again embrace the eternal verities. Macaulay's Horatius at the Bridge reminds us, "Then out spake brave Horatius,/ The Captain of the Gate:/ 'To every man upon this earth/ Death cometh soon or late;/ And how can man die better/ Than facing fearful odds,/ For the ashes of his fathers,/ And the temple of his gods."