08-31-2016, 08:22 AM
(08-28-2016, 06:03 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(08-28-2016, 03:04 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: There is no "white culture" to defend. I have no qualms about pushing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach to black people who try to push 'their' rap upon me. If black people can have images of a black Jesus and a black Santa Claus, then why not a "Black Bach"? Culture may have an ethnic flavor (there is no question that Degas is French, Dvorak is Czech, or Dostoevsky is Russian) but the really good stuff is accessible even with its ethnic flavoring. I do not have to be Japanese to recognize Hokusai as part of 'my culture'.
The attempt to achieve purity of culture as a cause of identity of a people is absurd. Racial homogenization is going on whether one likes it or not, and nobody can be sure what cultural identity the very black-looking child of a black man and a white mother has. Melanin does not have culture.
I hope you don't think that because you are open minded about artistic culture that everybody is as open minded. Some among the Alt Right are the sort to make a stink. I just don't know that they are making enough of a stink for me to care. Thus far, no. I'll let them make their teapot tempests on the net, and start taking them seriously when and if they start electing enough of their kind to actually try to do something.
I have no illusion about the goodness of humanity -- even its most sophisticated parts. Even artists could serve Hitler by glorifying his Master Race and his perversion of the Nietzschean Übermensch or Stalin with his empty Socialist Realism.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.