{"id":2300,"date":"2021-12-09T16:37:01","date_gmt":"2021-12-09T16:37:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2021\/12\/09\/our-unprecedented-cultural-predicament\/"},"modified":"2021-12-09T16:37:01","modified_gmt":"2021-12-09T16:37:01","slug":"our-unprecedented-cultural-predicament","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2021\/12\/09\/our-unprecedented-cultural-predicament\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Unprecedented Cultural Predicament"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Anton says here<\/a> what many  of us have been saying for years, but no one that I know of has ever said it better. One question that has been exercising me of late is: How long can a nation last that erects monuments to the worthless while destroying the memorials of the worthy? Here is Anton on George Floyd:<\/span><\/p>\n

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But in terms of what we choose to elevate, nothing illustrates the perversity of present America more than the deification of George Floyd. There are now monuments to him all over the country that are treated as sacred. In a rare instance when one is defaced, the resultant outcry resembles the Athenian people\u2019s reaction to the desecration of the Hermai. One may insist that George Floyd did not deserve to die the way he did and still see that neither did he live his life so as to make the possibility remote. He was convicted of eight crimes and charged with or detained for at least nineteen (though one must here concede the diffi<\/span>culty of finding reliable relevant information, since unflattering facts about Floyd\u2019s life are eff<\/span>ectively suppressed and are taboo to discuss). The worst of his crimes was an armed robbery in which he pointed a gun at the belly of a woman who may (or may not) have been pregnant. Floyd\u2019s admirers insist she wasn\u2019t, but more careful sources assert only that no one has ever definitively proved she was. Floyd was the father of five children, from whose lives he was by all accounts absent, and none of whose mothers he ever married. At the time of his death, Floyd was in the process of being arrested for yet another crime and was not cooperating with the arresting offi<\/span>cers. A serial drug abuser, he had in his system not just methamphetamine but a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl\u2014an extremely dangerous synthetic opioid\u2014which may well have contributed to his death. Even if one fully accepts the trial court\u2019s finding that the drugs played no role, one must still admit that had Floyd only gotten into the back of the police vehicle as offi<\/span>cers instructed, he could not have died in the way prosecutors (and the media) alleged. Above all, we must confront the painful fact that Floyd did not, according to moral standards that for centuries were taken for granted, live a life worthy of admiration, much less of veneration. Yet our society treats him as a saint, if not something higher. The pagan gods were not always well-behaved, to say the least. But has any people ever chosen such an undeserving object of worship?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I urge you all to study Anton's erudite essay. Comments enabled.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Anton says here what many  of us have been saying for years, but no one that I know of has ever said it better. One question that has been exercising me of late is: How long can a nation last that erects monuments to the worthless while destroying the memorials of the worthy? Here … Continue reading “Our Unprecedented Cultural Predicament”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-decline-of-the-west"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2300\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}