In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The other day, Washington, DC Mayor Bowser imposed a new control as part of her "reopening" protocols: no dancing at weddings. Two things immediately struck me. First, her poorest constituents, those who keep her in office, tend not to have weddings at all. Second, those who most notably do dance at weddings are the Jews. Thus do decrees cut across the social order. We actually know next to nothing about how COVID is transmitted, and banning dancing may have no effect. There must now be plenty of Jewish weddings in Texas and Florida, and I read of no new outbreaks there. But this actually illustrates another of the points Edward Feser makes in the essay I linked Wednesday : Gnostic moral practice veers between the extremes of puritanism and libertinism. Initially this might seem puzzling, but it makes perfect sense given the Gnostic’s other commitments. On the one hand, given the Gnostic hatred of the created order and of conventional moral and social life, what th...

It should be no surprise to regular visitors that I'm on several of Bp Barron's e-mail lists. Last week I received this announcement from his Word on Fire Institute: Meet the new Venerable Fulton J. Sheen Fellow of Popular Culture at the Word on Fire Institute Oxford and Yale Educated Former Episcopal Priest Andrew Petiprin Contemplates Catholicism and Popular Culture for the Word on Fire Institute Petiprin, the Venerable Fulton J. Sheen Fellow of Popular Culture, analyzes media through the lenses of philosophy and theology [Irving, TX] – The Word on Fire Institute, the arm of Bishop Robert Barron’s apostolate focused on educational and evangelistic formation, is pleased to highlight the work and accomplishments of its Fellows. Each Fellow brings unique gifts and a track record of noteworthy service in the fields of theology, apologetics, cultural renewal, and more. Andrew Petiprin’s work is shaped by his pastoral heart and his admiration for great art as found i...

In yesterday's post, I talked about Jordan Peterson's belated and puzzled response to the collapse of main line Protestant academic culture, something that took place largely in the 1960s and 70s. By concidence, I ran into an essay by the neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser that appeared this past January in Catholic World Report, The Gnostic heresy’s political successors . It talks about the academic side oif the culture that replaced main line Protestantism, gnosticism. Feser defines gnosticism as follows: First, it sees evil as all-pervasive and nearly omnipotent, absolutely permeating the established order of things. You might wonder how this differs from the Christian doctrine of original sin. It differs radically. Christianity teaches the basic goodness of the created order. It teaches that human beings have a natural capacity for knowledge and practice of the good – the idea of natural law. . . . Second, the Gnostic mentality holds that only an elect who h...

Jordan Peterson has recentlly begun to reenter the public forum following lengthy recovery from a life-threatening health crisis. As part of the reentry, he's done a second YouTube encounter with Bp Barron, which is linked above. The thing that strikes me most in the encounter is how little Jordan Peterson has changed. The guy has had as difficult a struggle against addiction and other health issues as I can imagine, but he's exactly the same Jordan Peterson who engaged Bp Barron in their first encounter in 2019. This is to say that he continues to be a product of the mid-20th century academic culture -- and I might go a little farther to say that since he was formed in part as a Harvard professor, it's mid-20th century Ivy League academic culture, precisely what I was exposed to in the 1960s. And this puzzles the heck out of me, the guy has simply not changed. Peterson's outlook is a largely inchoate melange of Jung, Freud, Nietzsche, Darwin, Orwell, and whate...

Gold Rush is yet another extremely popular cable show : Discovery Channel Struck gold on Friday Dec. 11 [2020] as two series, GOLD RUSH and GOLD RUSH: WHITE WATER, broke ratings and viewership records for the season. GOLD RUSH was the #1 program on ALL OF TELEVISION among Men, beating all broadcast networks, including CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX. On cable, GOLD RUSH and GOLD RUSH: WHITE WATER topped all networks among both Adults and Men. The development we're starting to see here, now a decade and more in process, is a completely new style of television entertainment that's eclipsed the sitcom of the 1950s and 60s. I suspect that the new genre has been so effective -- remember that people are now paying extra, directly, for these shows via cable subscriptions, when I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best were "free" -- that people have even become less nostalgic for the old ones. With good reason. This says mostly good things about the current state of our culture....

White House Press Secretaary Jen Psaki, an upper-class white woman with The Look, acknowledged the importance of the most-watched cable shows a few weeks ago, when, implying that white conservatives were somehow lagging behind in getting their vaccinations, she said, “We’ve run PSAs on the ‘Deadliest Catch,’ we’re engaged with NASCAR and Country Music TV,” Psaki added. “We’re looking for a range of ways to get directly connected to white conservative communities. . ." I found a 2014 piece in Variety that gives an indication of Deadliest Catch's continuing popularity: The show, which tells real-life stories aboard fishing vessels in the Bering Sea during crab fishing season, averaged 3.02 million viewers in the 9 o’clock hour, according to Nielsen, its largest audience in five weeks. It finished close behind TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting” (3.03 million) as the most popular cable series overall on the night. It’s in key demos, though, that “Deadliest Catch” is especi...

It's hard to tell which cable shows are highest rated, but amomg those is certainly The Curse of Oak Island , in which a bunch of white guys, under the guise of searching for hidden treasure, are actually starting to sponsor legitimate historical research in an area that's had little serious study. Nobody at this point, including the Lagina family, seems focused primarily on what treasure, if any, remains buried under the island. The question is increasingly what the heck went on there over a period of possibly 200+ years, because it's becoming plain that something did, and we know absolutely nothing about what it was. The 2020-21 season, shortened and handicapped by COVID restrictions, had the serendipitous effect of redirecting the searchers to what might be found on the surface in a shorter period and without heavy equipment. The result was to discover a heavily engineered road, probably reflecting military use, extending over some area of the island. Other naval and ...