Trashing the Culture | The American Spectator

It’s going on 30 years since we last heard from Dieter. He was the ultra-Berliner who hosted the fictional German TV show Sprockets on Saturday Night Live. The skit laid into artsy-craftsy pretentiousness with a surgical edge. Dieter’s blade didn’t stay out of the sheath long enough; insufferable phony airs survived the onslaught and still thrive. Sprockets was the kind of parody that begged for imitators. No one could succeed taking on the legions of Western Culture’s attackers — abetted by fifth columnists spiritually sacking our academies — all alone.
Pseudo-sophistication’s drag on authentic culture isn’t subsiding. At the present rate that poseurs are gathering elitist appeal they threaten to overtake the fine arts altogether. Rather than suffering the unmerciful filleting they’ve earned, they’ve got a youth brigade threatening fans of any creation that isn’t 200-proof schlock.
If “creativity” equals an insipidly uninspired punch line, why bother toiling away with anything worthwhile?
A good example of how far things have gone came in 2018. That was when Avital Ronnel, a professor of “German and comparative literature” (i.e. woke going for broke) at New York University, was accused of sexual harassment by her doctoral mentee Nimrod Reitman. The lady claims to be a lesbian but can’t keep her hands off younger boys. She holds the “Jacques Derrida chair” at her institution. This “lesbian” seduced the namesake of that position’s son when he was 16 and she was 27. They moved in together shortly thereafter. We live an age where academics adopt sexual persuasions that don’t fit for the political purpose of being oppressed. The many benefits of “persecution” have come to outweigh any burdens imposed.
The number of accredited sources describing Ronnel as “brilliant” could easily fill a page. YouTube serves a free buffet of this lecturer. Do psycho-babblings like this float your intellectual boat? Her orations name names from the Western canon — citing brief passages fro…