The Age of Designer Tribalism
by Floyd Looney
splunk, splunk, splunk...
That incessant dripping noise has woke me up again, I can't see where its coming from but I know it has part of the concrete floor wet. The moldy smell has gotten stronger on a daily basis since I came to be here. It is so dark, I can never tell what time of day it is. How did I come to be here, in this cell that would make Satan proud of my torturers? It is a story I have recounted and retold to myself more than once a day since I woke up in here the first time.
It wasn't all that long ago that a majority of citizens of this country were prosperous, even our 'poor' were doing better than the vast majority of the worlds population. I personally had been fired as a history teacher from a school because I taught real history not what the bosses called the 'correct' history. The 'correct' history was full of lies and absurdities.I found a job as a salesman for an upscale business selling home appliances, this wasn't the Maytag™ stuff you see on TV commercials. This was the shiny brass, chrome and copper stuff that you see in the kitchens of the rich and famous. It was truly beautiful kitchenware.
Anyway, on the side I wrote for a conservative journal dedicated to reviving the real history of the United States and the world. We called the purveyors of the 'correct' history names like 'revisionists' and 'third worlders'. The New History Review did okay, I suppose, but even with thousands of readers it couldn't hope to compete with ten thousand schools, large publishing houses and the traditional media.
It wasn't history that was at the forefront of the battle, we were fighting a skirmish and only seeing a small part of the problem. The worldview that brought us 'correct' history was much broader than we knew at the time, we were in a culture war. The designer tribalism of the leftist cult was succeeding in all but destroying the United States' own culture.
You know the people I am talking about, the culture I am referring to. Its the same culture that makes a TV program where its a child that lectures adults on the ways of the world. It is the adults who think we should live like nomads on the plains. These people who believe that bringing education, commerce and technology to the third war to replace cannibalism and tribal wars is something akin to a holocaust.
Normal people would call them weirdo's, probably even full out freakish.
As a teacher in a public school I was involved with showing a film for students, it was on a DVD and a big screen actually but someone needed to hit the light switch. The film of the day was about a tribe in Africa and their culture, we didn't teach American culture of course. It portrayed a paganistic ritual where the participants slaughtered a calf and drank its blood while it was still warm. The stab in the side of the calf allowed the blood to be pumped by its still beating heart into the wood-carved bowl.
The bonfire and hypnotic drumbeat added to the cultish feel of what was going on, we were watching a culture that revered gods of death, pleasure, war and animals. A culture that tolerated and celebrated deadly raids against neighboring tribes. Soon the film ended and I turned the lights on.
The children sat stunned and looking positively sickened. Rightly so, for we had a glimpse into darkness of 'savage' people. Their instict told them that what tbey saw on the TV screen was inherently evil and part of what should be in the past. The United States and the ways of the west were far superior with its medical care, freedoms of religion and speech, technology and even the fast foods.
The other teachers though were giddy and excited and they lectured the students about how the film showed a remarkable and different culture, but one equal or even superior to our own. The fact that it seemed primitive to us only showed that we are not an enlightened people. Our people had once oppressed these people with colonialism and slavery she told them as if they were both equally awful.
Colonialism was an attempt to bring the enlightened primitive peoples things like language, religion, technology and health care. This was a bad thing, of course. The part that was really bad was not the colonialism part though, it was the modernizing of the backward societies that outraged the leftists. The superior primitive societies had a right not to be educated, not to be given health care or language or commerce or technology. It was also somehow wrong to give them a choice.
This squeamish policy of letting a group of people rot while modern culture moved forward is why the Aborigine of Australia to have reading level by college age to drop from sixth grade and even thid grade levels. Now Aborigine students might arrive at college wholly illiterate, although their grandparents could read and write.
What a sad unculture indeed where the uneducated child with no life experience can be considered the better teacher than adults with decades of learning and experience. It was like the line in William Henry's 1994 book ,b>In Defense of Elitism where he argued, "It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose".
Of course that book had been banned at all public and most private schools years ago.
Was the Taliban culture in Afghanistan worth preserving even though it destroyed historic statues and persecuted anyone who didn't toe the line? The culture of the Taliban was one of the most ultimate of tribal primitism on the globe. They oppressed their women, forced their children to work and beat, mutilated and killed those who didn't obey the laws put forward by those in charge.
Was this culture worth preserving and superior to the west because it was primitive? Except for a few gasps from the left when a particularly outrageous insult occured, the answer was yes right up until September 11, 2001. For some the yes continued even afterwards.