Monthly Archives: August 2023

Im walking with Andy through my Riverwards neighborhood.

Andys been in Philadelphia for two years. Hes 26 years old but could easily pass as younger. He has a quiet and agreeable nature and seems more of a 60s stoner type than a typical K & A slumped over drug addict. Andys drug is fentanyl. He makes it clear to me that it is not meth. He would never use meth which often creates open sores and abscesses on the skin.

We pass other lost souls on our way to Wendys where Ill buy him a hamburger. They include a young man who steals beef jerky from Wawa and who can always be found flat on his back in the Rite Aid parking lot; the ginger-haired scrapper with brain cancer; a number of bulk shoplifters headed to the dollar stores with empty Santa Claus bags that will soon be filled with goodies stripped from the shelves.

In many ways, the scene parallels the fall of the greater society. Why shouldnt the homeless be getting worse when society itself seems to be splitting like cracks on an I-95 bridge?

Demonic nihilism has infected the nation, Jacob Howland recently declared in UnHerd. America is now a zombie state.

America is on a different kind of fentanyl.

Case study #1: The woke zombies at the Philadelphia Inquirer recently ran an investigatory piece detailing how many unacceptable political tweets Mark L. Tykocinski, president of Thomas Jefferson University, liked since being appointed president in July 2022.

Those tweets included comments questioning the validity of Covid vaccines to condemnations of child sex change operations. The president also liked tweets expressing skepticism about certain radical equity issues.

They investigated Tykocinskis tweets as if they were digging for facts behind a major crime. Imagine paying reporters to investigate how many tweets someone liked just to ruin their life. And the story doesnt end there. The Inquirer was first tipped off by a group of woke students at the university. The president then resigned under pressure but before that he apologized to the fascists in an attempt to save his job.

As the upper reaches of society crumble over trivialities like this, its no wonder that people like Andy, who comes from a good but impoverished home in Delaware, decide to go full hog into the drug world. Turn on, tune in, and drop out is happening all over.

When Andy first arrived in Philadelphia he didnt know how to panhandle, so asked a street elder how to do it. The elder, a guy named Moose, has been homeless for years, traveling the nation like the hobos of old: riding boxcars, hitchhiking, and taking Greyhound buses when he could afford to.

Moose spent some years on the streets of San Francisco, a city he calls the most evil in the nation. He was drawn to Philadelphia by the lure of cheap and plentiful drugs. Theres safety in numbers: just go to Kensington and Allegheny if you want proof of this. Hillary Clinton was right: It takes a village.

Moose gave Andy a few pointers: make a sign; walk with the sign through traffic at intersections, then wait for people to hand you dollar bills, sometimes twenties, sometimes even larger. Or wait for the unexpected: a banana in your face, milk shakes, soda bottles, a big blast of pepper spray. You never know whats going to come out of a car window or whos driving.

Andy has a makeshift tent not far off Aramingo Avenue in a small wooded area that developers no doubt have their eyes on.

The developers have claimed a lot of Kensington as their own, building condo multiplexes for more exiled New Yorkers and millennials with dogs. With nowhere else to go, the Kensington homeless are now forced to travel book bags and syringes in tow into areas of Port Richmond like Campbell Park, long considered a family spot but quickly turning into Narcan Plaza.

Complaints from neighbors in the Port Richmond area are growing. What was a beautiful neighborhood with decent Polish residents going to Mass every Sunday is slowly turning into your typical Philly dung heap.

Some of the homeless have Home Depot-style tents but Andys tent is his own rustic creation. Several feet away from him a fellow panhandler has pitched his own tent. They are not friends but acquaintances. Friends are hard to come by when you live on the street. Its every man or woman for himself.

Belongings book bags, tents, bicycles, shoes and cell phones disappear, thanks mainly to friends.

I came back from panhandling once and found a fat half-naked black man in my tent, Andy told me.

The weather was 95 degrees, the overweight man was sweating profusely, and Andy wanted him out. The man refused. This is my spot now, the man said. Andy reached for his pen knife and threatened him: Soft spoken peace-loving Andy, the stoner. Once a Gandhi pacifist, life on the streets has him pulling out a knife.

The street will do that to you.

The tent-crasher eventually left, but there was still Billy and Bob to worry about.

Billy and Bob are much like the editors at the Inquirer, the same ones who ruined the life of Mark Tykocinski. They keep watch. They keep tabs. They live to cancel people.

Billy and Bob live in a Home Depot tent with lots of perks. They steal from fellow homeless but do it in clever, manipulative ways. They are also a couple but not in the Ozzie and Harriet sense because they are open to interludes with strangers, especially new young homeless faces who might want to make a few bucks.

Because Billy is the younger and more attractive partner, overweight Bob does most of the (grueling) panhandling. Its the price you sometimes have to pay when you have a trophy lover.

Andy says Billy and Bob snowballed him when he needed to use their phone to access an app in order to get money his father sent him. Billy and Bob stole his money and then acted as if they had a right to do so, just as the Inquirer editors felt it was their right to cancel out Tykocinski. Billy and Bob have hit on other homeless people as well.

Some history: The citys drug-addicted homeless were different when heroin was the drug everyone was abusing. In those days, even the worst of addicts could hold a conversation, make eye contact, and act in normal ways. Todays addicts are often the reverse of that. The effects of animal tranquilizer additives produce anti-social behavior, an inability to construct simple sentences, and spasmodic bodily movements on a par with the antics in The Exorcist.

A thousand and one ways to make your way in a society on the decline: this might be a book title if Clint and May, a homeless couple from the Lancaster area, were to write a book.

Mays daily beat includes holding a sign and walking in the middle of traffic at Aramingo and York Streets while waving at drivers like shes in the Miss America Pageant. Last year she and Clint hosted a Thanksgiving dinner in the woods where they roasted a turkey near the Conrail tracks. Invited guests brought shoplifted items from Wawa and various dollar stores. The turkey was good, Andy recalls.

Clint and May have been together forever, an unusual thing in homeless circles.

Drug addicted homeless couples rarely go on to live happy lives together. Life on the street is not conducive to happy relationships.

A mere ten years ago, most of the Riverwards homeless were single men. Women simply didnt subject themselves to the dicey possibilities that living on the street entails. In todays world, equality rules; homeless women prowl the streets late at night while well bred domestic women who live in houses express fear about going out late alone.

Sometimes May will throw Andy a few extra bucks when she makes a lot of panhandling money. Shes got a motherly instinct, Andy says. Shes also an avid fighter: Clint and Mays fights are usually public spectacles.

Getting arrested is always a possibility when you go down the way an expression a lot of addicts use to acquire your daily allotment of drugs. The thing is, dont be fooled by the apparent freedom and anarchy on the streets at K & A where zombies shoot up on the streets. Theres still vast undercover police sting operations away from K & A around the Huntingdon and Somerset El stations. Men and women in or out of uniform wait in unmarked police cars.

Andy tells me he was caught buying five dollars worth.

Two men sprung out of a car and nabbed him near a boarded up storefront.

A legitimate arrest is one thing. After all, a law has been broken, but why the need to take Andys book bag, his only possession, and cut it in half after dumping the contents out in a dumpster? After this came taunting and a bit of bullying. No offers of a phone call at the police station. Andy was thrown in with a bunch of people who bragged about killing someone.

Okay, cops are human and they have limits like everybody else. Theyre sick of dealing with drug violations and the bizarre anti-social behavior produced by animal tranquilizers.

Everybody and everything is breaking down, even people who are supposed to be the good guys.

In the meantime, the societal decline continues on its merry way. Andy is waiting for another arrest, which is sure to come, as the Inquirer, in its self-righteous blindness, prepares to take aim at another unsuspecting lover of freedom.

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. He is the author of fifteen books, including Literary Philadelphia and From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia. His latest, Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest was released in May 2023.

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Thom Nickels: Demonic nihilism? It's not just on the streets. - Broad + Liberty

The Narrow Passage: Plato, Foucault, and the Possibility of Political Philosophy by glenn ellmersencounter books, 120 pages, $21.99

The year 2020 revealed two dominant impulses in the American-led world order. First, the yearning to transcend politics in favor of scientific administration, embodied in the widespread eclipse of self-government by public health experts to manage our response to COVID-19. Second, a fascination with a racial-cultic substrate that lies below the ordinary plane of politics, embodied in the ritual destruction of whiteness and veneration of Blackness after the death of George Floyd.

Glenn Ellmers is not in the business of prediction, and his new book The Narrow Passage does not opine on the stability (or fragility) of our regime. Instead, he analyzes its contradictions as a scholar of political philosophy and as a disciple of Leo Straussand especially of Strausss student Harry Jaffa. A reader expecting the clichd conservative formulaWe must reinvigorate the principles of Western civilization (namely, the liberal values of America two or three decades ago) to halt the lefts extremism and correct the impoverished philistinism of the Rightwill be disappointed. Though Ellmers is opposed, without qualification, to the political agenda and anti-philosophical currents of left ideology, he is surprisingly sympathetic to their psychological roots. His book is an inquiry into the human condition that occasioned the culture war.

Following Strauss, Ellmers understands Western civilization, and perhaps humanity itself, as animated by the tension between the philosopher (for whom the unexamined life is not worth living) and the city (which requires the authority of unexamined opinions). Every political order sees itself as the holy city, animated by a divine commandment to make no covenant with and show no mercy to alien nations, but instead to destroy their altars, cut down their groves, and burn their graven images. But the philosopher questions all opinions, including those that his holy city accepts as true and unquestionable. The deepest roots of our present discontent are found, not in 1968, or 1789, or 1776, or the Enlightenment, or medieval nominalism, but in the human soul itself.

So far, so Straussian. But Ellmers, following Jaffa, accords far more respect to the possible truth of revelation, to the dignity of the moral virtues, and to the demands of political life than most Straussians, whose philosophic supremacism typically results in contempt for politics even unto complicity in the leftward drift of our political order. Though he collapses even religion into the political, Ellmerss respect for politics grants him access to the motives of the revolutionaries on the left who are prosecuting our cold civil war and the radicals on the right who wish for nothing more than the destruction of our decadent regime.

Ellmers describes the contradiction within our present regime as between a scientific-bureaucratic-rational state indebted to Hegel (and represented by Fauci-ism) and a post-modern rejection of all objective standards indebted to Nietzsche (and represented by Floydism). This is the point at which a genealogist of our present regime such as Christopher Rufo might observe that these two strands were masterfully interwoven by the New Left during its half-century march through our institutions; that the contradiction between these strands explains the growing nihilism of the victors; and that their nihilism should encourage Americans attempting a cultural and political counterrevolution. Ellmers addresses the nihilistic terminus of our present regime via a discussion of Michel Foucault, whom he takes as a guide to how todays intellectuals perceive the world, and therefore how the ruling class, at least to some degree, thinks and operates. But he frames the Hegel/Nietzsche or Fauci/Floyd contradiction as the most recent incarnation of the tension between the rational tyranny of philosophy and the tribal passions of politics, between two aspects of human nature described by Aristotle: that all men desire to know and that man is by nature a political animal.

Neither aspect can be abolished. What is often described as a worrying return of tribalism is in fact a reassertion of our political nature, an attempt to recover a sense of meaning and purpose by recreating a holy community of citizen-believers. Drawing on Fustel de Coulangess classic study The Ancient City, Ellmers notes that the spirit of the closed city, with its intense religious and civic camaraderie, seems to be deeply embedded in the human psyche.

And doubling down on the importance of philosophy is no answer, at least not in the conventional way. Plato cannot be a simple hero for Ellmers, representing as he does the philosophic tendency to rational tyranny over ordinary politics. Yet it is from Platos Statesman that Ellmers concludes that the promise of a comprehensive political science which seeks to displace the moral virtue and practical wisdom of the statesmans prudence remains dubious. Plato, then, teaches us as much about the danger that philosophy poses to politics as he does the danger that politics poses to philosophy. The open society and rational state that was the dream (or nightmare) of so many twentieth-century intellectuals, and which presupposed a final resolution to the tension between philosophy and politics, is impossible for both psychological and scientific reasons.

Ellmers thus accepts what so many centrist and conservative intellectuals cannot: that we have never transcended our political nature, and never will, unless and until we achieve the abolition of man. This allows him to avoid a typical conclusion by conservative scholars and culture-warriors: the lamentation of the decline of the postwar liberal order and of the purportedly neutral or at least tolerant postwar academy. Such lamentations, insofar as they wish for a culture without conflict and a nation beyond partisanship, ignore our ineluctably political nature.

The great (but largely unannounced) theme of Ellmerss work is thumos or spiritedness, the part of the human soul that C. S. Lewis called the Chest, the middle element [by which] man is man rather than pure intellect or mere instinct, the part that unifies and dignifies us and by which we feel indignation, righteous or not. Aristotle argued that the best regime required both the habits of freedom of a high-spirited culture and the rationality of an advanced civilization; one without the other produces either overzealous tribalism or slavish subjection. It is thumos that creates affectionateness, the civic friendship or civility whose decline is so often lamented today. But friendship among fellow-citizens is itself a species of what St. Thomas calls piety, the virtue of justice exercised toward those to whom we are indebted for our being and our government: family, country, and God. Little wonder, then, that decline in religion has been followed by declines in patriotism and family formation.

Ellmers errs in largely subordinating religion to his discussions of citizenship in the holy city. Perhaps for this reason, he neglects some of the most interesting features of Coulangess Ancient City, namely, what distinguished Rome from the Greek cities, and how the eclipse of the ancient city prepared for the advent of Christianity. Still, Ellmers offers a helpful corrective from which Christians can learn. It is not enough to dismiss wokeness as a new and false religion, to be combatted with the true religion. Nor can we forget our political duties while seeking to do right by our fellow men and women. We are naturally citizens. Proper piety to our human creditors is not only a school for piety to our heavenly Father, but also a duty enjoined upon us by him. Perhaps our full conversion requires that we recollect the relation between our duties to family, country, and God.

Pavlos Leonidas Papadopoulos is assistant professor of humanities at Wyoming Catholic College.

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Reflections on the Revolution in America | Pavlos Leonidas ... - First Things

Summary

The constant rain in David Finchers bleak neo-noir Se7en creates a memorable atmosphere, but there were also practical reasons for employing it in the film. With its dark tone, engrossing plot, and top-notch cast, Se7en is rightly remembered as one of David Finchers best films. The thriller follows Mills (Brad Pitt) and Somerset (Morgan Freeman), two homicide detectives on the trail of an elusive serial killer whose murders are modeled after the seven deadly sins.

Se7ens dark tone and harrowing ending were considered a serious gamble upon the films release in 1995. After a disastrous test screening, director David Fincher had to battle with the studio to keep the film as it was (via Daily Hind). Ultimately, the venture paid off, revitalizing Finchers career and proving that star Pitt could deliver depth. The rich, almost gothic atmosphere of Se7en is praised to this day, with the use of rain proving one of the most engaging, atmospheric tools in its arsenal, but the downpour wasnt in the original script.

While Andrew Kevin Walkers Se7en screenplay does include some mention of rain, it isnt nearly as heavy nor as constant as in David Finchers final film. While the rain can be heard beating down from the first moments of the finished film, the first line in Walkers script is Sunlight comes through the soot on the windows. Its a striking opening line, but Fincher has practical reasons for disregarding it. As for the heaviness of the rain, this was the only real option for Se7en since light rain is hard to create and even harder to capture on film.

David Fincher cites a primarily pragmatic motivation for the continuous nature of the rain. The '90s were a big decade for Pitt, who was already seeing his star rise thanks to such films as 1994s Interview with the Vampire. As such, the actor was only available to shoot Se7en for 55 days. With such a tight timeframe, Fincher and the crew couldnt afford to lose a day of shooting. As a result, the director chose to have it always raining in the films city sequences so that production wouldnt be thrown off if it started raining for real (via Scraps From The Loft).

While the primary reason for Se7ens constant rainfall boils down to maximized shooting efficiency, the rain powerfully reinforces the films themes and contributes significantly to the visual and sonic atmosphere of the film. Even during interior scenes, the pounding of the rain is hard to ignore, reinforcing the bleak, noirish sense of a city oppressed by a thundering downpour of sin and nihilism, which cant be forgotten even when the characters are safely inside. Likewise, the reflective quality of the rain achieves a black-and-white contrast that feeds into Se7ens noir-esque visual language.

On a thematic level, the motif of rain feeds into Se7ens biblical allusions. Serial killer John Does image of himself as a weapon of God sent to eradicate sin is corroborated by the heavy rain, which calls to mind the Old Testament story of Noahs Ark and the torrential flood which was intended to wipe the earth clean of the sins of humanity. After John Doe turns himself in on the 6th day of Se7en, the rain ceases, signaling that the flood-like killings have come to an end. Se7ens climactic ending takes place in an arid landscape beneath a cloudless sky where, as with Noahs Ark, the floods have finally receded.

Sources: Daily Hind, Scraps From The Loft

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Why It's Always Raining In The Movie Se7en: David Fincher's ... - Screen Rant

Credits

Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.

The most advanced AIsupercomputersare considered so awesome because of the speed with which they can process information, so far up to one quintillion calculations per second!For all the feverish hubbub stirred by humankinds newest innovation, one wonders, though, if awe itself, encountered in poetic time, will be lost in this age of acceleration.

Poetic time is the opposite of the turbocharged tempo of intelligent machines. It apprehends reality by dwelling mindfully on those moments computation relegates in passing to mere data points.

It is worth slowing down along our quickening trajectory to reflect on the sage perspectives of two of the greatestpoetsof the 20thcentury, Octavio Paz and Czesaw Miosz, both muses of the moment whom I had the humbling privilege of knowing.

For Miosz, good poetry expresses a sense of piety for being in a world that has succumbed to a peculiar nihilism in which experience loses is colors. Grayness covers not only things of this earth and space, but also the very flow of time, the minutes, days and years.

In such a dulled-down landscape, abstract considerations are of little help or remedy, the Nobel laureate put it to me in one conversation. Poetry matters greatly in the face of this deprivation because it looks at the singular, not the general. It cannot look at things of this earth other than honestly, with reverence, as colorful and variegated; it cannot reduce life with all its pain and ecstasy into a unified tonality. By necessity it is on the side of being.

For Miosz, mindfulness occurs in the moment when time stops. And what is time? Time is our regrets, our shame. Time contains all things toward which we strive and from which we escape. In that moment of time stopped, reality is liberated from suffering. Then, in art, you can have a purified vision of things independently of our dirt. Everything that concerns us disappears, is dissolved, and it does not matter whether the eye that looks is that of a beggar or a king.

The eternal moment in the gaze of the Polish poet is like a gleam on the current of a black river, retrieved from movement by mindful attention.

One of Miloszspoemsperfectly illustrates this pious regard for those palpable moments of being that elude any abstract sense at the end of the road of existence. It reads in part:

I was running, as the silks rustled, through room after room without stopping, for I believed in the existence of a last door.

But the shape of lips and an apple and a flower pinned to a dress were all that one was permitted to know and take away.

Octavio Paz, also a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, put the nature of the moment in the larger frame of social evolution. He believed that temporal succession no longer rules the imagination after all of the abstract utopias of modern progress that didnt pan out. As now recognized by quantum science, he saw that we live instead in the conjunction of times and spaces, of synchronicity and confluence, which converge in the pure time of the instant. Coherence and equilibrium are the momentary exception in the random swirl of disequilibrium that is the rule.

As the poet explained further in a conversation in Mexico City back in the 1980s, This time without measure is not optimistic. It doesnt propose paradise now. It recognizes death, which the modern cult of the future denies, but also embraces the intensity of life. In the moment, the dark and the luminous side of human nature are reconciled. The paradox of the instant is that it is simultaneously all time and no time. It is here and it is gone. It is the point of equilibrium between being and becoming.

He continued: The instant is a window to the other side of time eternity. The other world can be glimpsed in the flash of its existence. In this sense, poets have always had something to show modern man.

While this recognition of time without measure may be new to the modern sensibility of the Western clock, Paz pointed out, it has long been intimated in the East through the traditional form of the haiku. This terse but evocative verse from the Edo-era Japanese poetMatsuo Bash is a classic example:

Stillness Penetrating the rocks The sounds of cicada

In his last poem, Response and Reconciliation, Paz conveyed his vision of time arrested using a similar metaphor as Milosz to describe the eternal moment of being in the flow of becoming:

For a moment, sometimes, we see not with our eyes, but with our thoughts time resting in a pause. The world half-opens and we glimpse the immaculate kingdom the pure forms, presences unmoving, floating on the hour, a river stopped.

If, as Paz said, poetic time had much to teach modernity, it has even more to teach the hastening era of hyper-modernity we are now entering.

Read more from the original source:

Poetic Time In The Age Of Acceleration - Noema Magazine

When singer-songwriter Chloe Drallos first premiered her music project known as Zilched in 2018, she self-ascribed her own genre of doom pop.

While arguably cryptic, it also somehow perfectly fits.

The music of Zilched is a murky mix of brooding guitars and catchy, haunting choruses, while moody minor keys and drapes of distortion envelop lyrics of disenchantment sung in a low, beautifully dusky voice that could soar into higher ranges and still retain its bittersweetness.

The bitter and the sweet, the doom and the pop, the low and the high. You hear the name Zilched and it suggests depletion or perhaps millennial nihilism but what Drallos is after is much more expansive.

Tangentially, the overall sound and production for her dulcet gloom ballads are expanded and refined on her latest album,Earthly Delights, due to her collaboration with producers Ben Collins and Ian Ruhala. Drallos is tapping into styles that are typically associated with angst goth, noise-pop or post-grunge and the angst portrayed on Earthly Delights is the strain of existing within a volatile vortex between those dichotomies.

Watch the music video for Zilched The Flood

There are sentiments strung across the record that admit to a yearning but still acknowledge a certain hopelessness. Drallos is singing from a balancing point between desolation and delight, if not some kind of divine. And maybe thats a way to interpret the zilch of Zilched the zero balance between the muck and the marvelous of living and loving and losing and learning.

Its the plight of the yearning / To build up a wall and then watch it decay / Its all tragedy / But its what you love, Drallos sings on (You Love) The Tragedy.

Oh, the angst. No one does it better than Zilched. Earthly Delights is Drallos best album to date.

Its worth noting that the albums title is a reference to a famous painting by Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch, which was painted as a triptych the Garden of Earthly Delights is essentially in dimensional balance between heaven and hell.

And while there are some provocative religious references scattered across the record, its all about the balance of that triptych that makes it feel like the perfect allusion for a Zilched album title.

Zilched will celebrate the release of Earthly Delights this Saturday at El Club in Detroit. Tickets are $17 and available at elclubdetroit.com.

WDETs unique music programs are dedicated to exploring the music and culture of our region and the world. Keep the music going. Please make a gift today. Give now

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Review: Zilched releases her best work yet in 'Earthly Delights' - WDET

This week on the Q with Tom Power podcast is host Tom's post-Coachella sit down with singer Phoebe Bridgers for a career-spanning interview tracing her early years in Pasadena, CA, to becoming one of the most acclaimed singer-songwriters of her time.

LISTEN NOW:Q with Tom Power:Phoebe Bridgers

4X-GRAMMY nominee Phoebe Bridgers is known for her sad-girl Alt-anthems both as a solo artist and with her group boygenius, offering extremely specific and relatable songs to a growing fan base as rabid as Beyonc's Bey Hive and Taylor's Swifties.

Phoebe explains her upbringing in the suburbs of Pasadena, where she somehow tapped into a kind of "past-life pain" when she began writing deeply personal songs at the age of ten. "I think I was just trying to make myself happy," she says. "I also remember I thought plagiarism wasn't as big a deal when I was little. I would literally steal verses from other people and put them into my own songs."

Now 29 years old, the "past-life pain" has given way to real-life relationships, experiences, and loss -- all of which she's considered fair game in her songwriting. Though she's known for leaning into the sad side with her songs, Phoebe says that may not always be where her initial inspiration began. "I have disassociative tendencies, so I think I write it and I'm like, 'that was pretty.' Then like a year later I'm like, 'Oh s***, this is actually really heavy.'"

"Believe it or not," she explains, "when I feel down, I'm actually trying to get better... the thing that's been commodified," Phoebe believes in the outward appearance people give off about never being able to find happiness. "Well, I hope that's not true," she adds.

"When people write about it too much, it's like everybody knows everything about you. But I think there's something to be said for -- and I talk about this with my friends all the time -- people just think you're smarter if you're sad," Phoebe says. "Peppy love songs get kind of a bad rap as being dumb, and I think my next challenge in my life is to have a way to write about happiness that doesnt make me cringe.

"It's self-protective... Culturally, just think about every nihilist ever -- I guess it's not nihilism to be emo -- but I think you associate darkness with being an intellectual or something. I think that's such a narrow lens, and Im guilty of it too.

Listen to the full episodewithPhoebe Bridgers above. Also in this episode, Shane Ghostkeeper talks to guest host Talia Schlanger about his deeply personal song Hunger Strike and more.

Five days a week, acclaimed interviewerTom Powersits down with the artists, writers, actors, and musicians who define pop culture. Whether hes ribbingAdele, singing a boyband classic withSimu Liu, or dissecting faith withU2frontmanBono Tom brings the same curiosity, respect, and meticulous preparation into every conversation. He also has a track record for interviewing artists on the precipice of stardom likeLizzoandBillie Eilish who appeared onQwell before hitting the mainstream. Hear your favorite artists as they truly are, every weekday with Tom Power.

Listen to more of your favorite music on Audacy's Women of Alt, Emo Kids, Alt Now, Rockternative, Drivin' Alt, New Wave Mix Tape, 90s and Chill, Alterna 00s, IndustriALT,Greatest Guitarists, Greatest Drummers, and ALT Roots stations -- plus check out our talent-hosted Kevan Kenney's Music Discovery, and Megan Holiday's My So Called '90s Playlist.

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Phoebe Bridgers thinks we confuse sadness with intelligence: Listen ... - Audacy

Detail from "Portrait of Nietzsche" (1906) by Edvard Munch (Image: Wikipedia)

When I was a young man, I loved Peter Weirs 1989 boarding school drama Dead Poets Society, featuring Robin Williams in one of his most celebrated roles.

Back then, I admired Williamss character, Mr. Keating, a rebel rouser teacher who tries to wake up a group of rich kids, who, without his help, are destined to end up in the same boardrooms and country clubs as their fathers. I liked the rebellious stuff, but I also admired the stuffy establishment setting. That was me, I guess: a kid who felt at home in a conservative aesthetic but did not want to be told what to do. My one complaint with the film was that the boys did not appreciate that they got to push their boundaries amid New England fall foliage and mahogany leather, while I was suffering alongside philistines in flip-flops at my suburban Florida mega-high school.

Anyway, Mr. Keating did not follow the script, prescribing Walt Whitman poems and encouraging the bookish young men in his charge to sound their barbaric yawps. He turned a blind eye when they snuck off at night to perform faux-primitive rituals and read their middling adolescent verses aloud. Again, as a teenager I ate it up. When Mr. Keating got fired after one of the boys committed suicide, I felt bad for him. I imagined I would have stood up on my desk proclaiming O Captain, my Captain along with the other boys who were devastated to see their rascally mentor go.

Through high school and college, I pretended to intellectual superiority by avoiding mainstream American male inanities. I never set foot in a frat house. I majored in French. I sat alone on my dorm balcony smoking cigarettes and listening to Nick Drake. I looked to cinematic icons like Jean-Paul Belmondo and Woody Allen (yes, Woody Allen), and I searched half-heartedly for my own brand of existentialism. I decided to keep God sort of in the picture. Good for me.

Then, in the early 2000s, I had a brief career as a high school teacher, and I styled myself something of a Mr. Keating, spouting off whatever niche political opinions I had from one day to the next, belittling the official curriculum I was given to teach, and looking for any opportunity I could to plant seeds in the minds of young people especially boys to reject the rottenness of bourgeois America and to choose an extraordinary path for themselves in life. I wanted to be the kind of teacher who could help guys feel intellectually strong, to avoid being the figure Mr. Keating ridicules in Dead Poets Society: a 98-pound weakling who gets copies of Byron kicked in his face when he goes to the beach.

I also began lifting weights, and despite my skinny frame, I put on muscle quickly, with my personal best lifts increasing for years. I suddenly excelled in physical pursuits with the same rebellious perfectionism that had made me an excellent, even intimidating student in school. I often saw my students at the gym and we would spot each other. In my classroom, I challenged football players to push-up contests, and I never lost. My lifelong prejudice against mediocrity intensified for myself, of course, but increasingly as contempt for weakness in the world too, even though I still proudly voted Blue and was more-or-less comfortable with liberal Protestantism as the best place for a huge snob to opine about what Christianity, and everything else, should be.

It was all pretty fun; but remembering those years makes me cringe a bit now. Like Mr. Keating, I was reckless, and selfish. I was something of a Nietzschean blond beast.

But then God began to save me from myself first by giving me a wife, and then by sending me out to study theology. Suddenly I had one person on earth whose feelings had to come before mine, and whose love for me humbled me, despite my ongoing immaturity. And then I acquired a whole library of Father-figure teachers, intellectual giants that far outweighed my heroes Montaigne and Goethe and Truffaut. I kept lifting weights, certainly. But I looked into the mirror less often and I felt less inclined to enjoy hating the growing cultural void in society around me.

Ive recently discovered these words from Pascals Penses that pulled me back in time to the moment of my spiritual coming-of-age:

Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God.

At twenty-seven years old, I was finally ready to be a man, and a man in Christ. Not a superman.

And this brings us to the aforementioned Friedrich Nietzsche. The sincerity of my Christian upbringing had stuck to me too closely to go all the way dark during my Wanderungsjahren. Even though I was enamored with existentialism, I preferred the humane Camus to the misanthropic Sartre. Hence I mostly avoided Nietzsche; but I can imagine an alternate reality where the right Nietzschean got hold of me at the right moment, and I came out (at least for a while) an utterly cynical, narcissistic creep. And this brings us to a most disturbing latter-day Mr. Keating called the Bronze Age Pervert, a highly-influential Romanian-American man named Costin Alamariu, who was recently profiled in a fascinating piece by Graeme Wood.

I wont rehearse all the details of BAP here again, I highly recommend Woods article for that but heres the gist: A self-described aspiring nudist bodybuilder with a Ph.D. from Yale has captivated a portion of young people on the political Right with the false gospel of Nietzsches beyond good and evil and will-to-power. Learning of the BAP phenomenon immediately reminded me of an idea attributed to Ross Douthat, related here by Rod Dreher: the post-religious Right is really bad news.

But criticizing BAPs immoralism is too easy, and perhaps too self-congratulatory. (Right Wingers love to police our fringes to find real bad guys to point to when progressives smear us.) A more serious intellectual engagement is required.

Now, it is possible that some BAPist aims could overlap with those of faithful Catholics. But the fundamental moral visions are polar opposite. And Woods article asserts that there is a sleeper cell of BAPists who have infiltrated the U.S. government and other influential institutions, and they are biding their time before coming out in the open and seizing the reins. In my mind, there is no chance these guys will ever pull off a coup, but I do have some concerns that the movement will enlarge the space of anti-Christ in our society at the very moment when the veil over the fiction of a neutral public square increasingly falls. And I worry that the Church of our day is in no position to offer astute young seekers, exhausted by mediocrity, a superior lifestyle choice rooted in the philosophical depth BAP presumes to offer.

On this point, Woods otherwise excellent article offers a nave conclusion namely, that BAPs movement may serve to renew the defenses of a liberalism that has grown lazy by taking its dominance for granted for too long. The antibodies are stirring, he writes.

I dont think so.

In fact, I find it hard to believe that great numbers of people under 30 (or 60?) would care to come to the defense of the Enlightenment or find the ideals of liberalism compelling anymore. Nietzsche thought all of this was passing away, and he may have been right. Now the Dictatorship of Relativism has been conquered by the even crueler consumerist, post-human technocracy. To resist it requireswellquite a triumph of the will.

But if Christians must reject BAPs chauvinism and we must and if there is no way to re-implement the ideals of modern liberalism and I dont see how there is we have to propose a different philosophical project of Christian humanism and the resurrection of Christian society.

One person to look to for inspiration is the 20th-century German soldier and polymath Ernst Jnger, a one-time Nietzschean. Ive written before about the early Jnger and his most famous work, Storm of Steel, a World War I memoir with the opposite perspective of Erich Maria Remarques famous All Quiet on the Western Front. Jnger was wounded several times and decorated for valor in the Great War, and afterward he was highly critical of the Weimar government, and of liberal democracy. Hitler admired him, but Jnger never joined the Nazis. He did, however, don the uniform of the Third Reich during World War II, where he was posted to Paris and hobnobbed with French intellectuals. Ultimately, he was peripherally involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler an event fictionalized in Bryan Singers great 2008 film Valkyrie. Hitler knew of Jngers involvement and let him off the hook. Make of that whatever you like.

Jnger is not well known in the United States. His status as a major man of letters in Europe, and particularly Germany, is too enormous to relate here, but this Swedish documentary is a fascinating introduction. Jnger lived to the ripe-old-age of 102, and was received into the Catholic Church shortly before he died in 1998. He has become a cult figure for English-speaking Right Wingers, including BAP; but most of them fail to acknowledge Jngers turn away from Nietzscheanism and towards Christian humanism during World War II, when he read through the entire Bible closely. The result was a little treatise called The Peace.

Although Jnger did not refer to himself as a Christian at the time when the book was released, The Peace is entirely grounded in Christian metaphysics. Jnger advocated for dispassionate justice to be meted out to the aggressors, and he wanted a solution that would bring about immediate victory and long-term flourishing for the entire European continent (totally unlike the Treaty of Versailles); but without Christ at the center of society, they may just as well have annihilated each other.

Jnger envisioned a new Christian imperium to stand between the emerging materialist superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. His project was an utter rejection of nihilism, and he wrote Spiritual salvation must come first, and only that peace can bring a blessing which has been preceded by the taming of the passions in these hearts and minds of men. Likewise, If the struggle against nihilism is to succeed, it must be fought out in the heart of each one of us.

And most significantly, Jnger argues that the incautiousness of the Mr. Keatings and the cruelty of the BAPs of the world can only lead us to destruction:

The leadership of men cannot be granted to the nihilists, to the pure technicians or to those who despise all moral obligations. Whoever places his trust in man and human wisdom alone cannot speak as judge, nor can he expound as teacher, heal as doctor or serve the state as official. These are modes of life that end with hangmen in the seats of the mighty.

Jnger rejected the idea that a return to a liberal state was the answer. The failure of Weimarism was final. And while he insisted that the churches were central to the peaceful future of Europe, he also saw that the churches, too, stand in need of a revival.

Eighty years after World War II, Christians must stare down todays nihilism, both in the wacky but worrisome BAP variety, and in the de facto atheism in the hearts of most modern people, including churchgoers. But the Church can only succeed in this task by refocusing on the deep mysteries of reality the God beyond the death of God, as Paul Tillich said. Another much greater German than Jnger, our late Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI, pursued this project to the very end of his life.

The Church needs to carry forward Benedicts ideas and teach the world that our faith is a comprehensive, lived philosophical proposal that puts the Bronze Age Perverts antiquated will-to-power Nietzscheanism to shame. And so, we give the late Pope Emeritus the final word here from his essay Monotheism and Tolerance, from Ignatius Press newly published collection What is Christianity? The Last Writings:

The thought of Socrates, who was pious and critical at the same time, had in its own way the effect of unveiling the illusory character of the gods. Today we face the opposite movement of the human mind. Modern thought wants to acknowledge the truth of being, but wants to acquire power over being. It wants to reshape the world according to its own needs and desires. With this orientation not to the truth but to power we no doubt touch on the true problem of the present time.

Todays Christian thinkers task is to expose the lie of powers promises with counter-cultural zeal a task, by the way, that requires manliness (virtus). Is anyone up to the challenge?

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Called to be a man in Christ, not a Nietzschean superman - Catholic World Report