Our title quote from the movie No Country for Old Men speaks to conservative angst, but the corruption of certain cultural watersheds, now appropriately specified as swamps, are key components to cultural (and political) decline.
A case is made that intellectual softness moral confusion and corruption in higher education generated the tide is made in a book by David Gelernter, a Yale professor of computer science titled, America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats).
Jenifer Lopez of National Review Online conducted an interview with Gelernter available in its entirety here. We have not read the book as yet but according to Lopez, while alarming, the book and author are cautiously exuberant and give readers a pep talk, encouraging them to be the light (not “lite”).
Nevertheless we set forth here some of the trenchant observations about modern academia and its creation Barack Obama, as set forth in the interview:
“The American cultural elite used to resemble (more or less) the rest of America. Today it disdains the rest of America. That’s a revolution.”
LOPEZ: Why do you, a distinguished professor, call Barack Obama “an airhead liberal”?
GELERNTER: His casual, unscripted comments suggest that he is typical (only more so) of the graduates of his alma maters Columbia and Harvard: Whatever he knows or doesn’t know, he certainly projects no grasp of modern history or any history. He casually rejects the American Creed, which has always centered on American uniqueness, American exceptionalism, America as that city on a hill striving to be worthy to lead the whole world towards freedom, equality, democracy.
. . . Expecting post-religious, Bible-ignorant thinkers to grasp America is like expecting a gerbil to sing Pagliacci.
. . . A whole generation has been taught that truth is just a matter of taste.
Thanks to DLH for recommending the significance of the article
