This Spengler (has it a family name to go with that, like Spengler MacMagonnary? Or is it missing its first name, like Rickey Spengler? Or is it merely an ego, like Prince or Madonna?) appears to be educated beyond its ability. Are we supposed to think it's the Teutonic sage who was wrong about nearly everything, Oswald Spengler? He's been pushing up daisies for something like seventy years, so under those conditions, he could perhaps have written this.
A lightweight that can fire a broadside of big words is still a lightweight. This is something I see a lot of -- people projecting their pre-existing framework onto someobody else's work, and then bitching that the work is no good because it doesn't fit the frame.
You know, "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish" was also a milepost on our society's road to perdition.
And the snide replay of Dorothy Parker's comment on AA Milne is perfectly apropos: in 2005, people still read Milne.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Cheese youse ignant.
"decline of the west" Spengler. "nom de plume" -- Google it.
He makes some good points, though. The Potter books do have an oversimplified view of good and evil. Some characters are naturally good, and others naturally evil, and that's that. Introspection and internal division aren't central features of the book.
But the soldiers who won the Second World War for us were largely readers of comics and other junk literature. They weren't averse to sacrifice or higher values or overcoming the self, but they didn't make a cult of such things, as some on the other side did.
"Spengler" reads something like Frederic Wertham and other critics of comics and popular literature of the 1950s. He's high-minded and right about much in popular culture. But Wertham underestimated the resiliancy and durability of society, and perhaps "Spengler" has done the same.
And some of us still "fwow up" when faced with Milne. Literature will always be subjective.