First time I've listened to Zero Hour. I love that Blaze has recognized your talent!
Interesting discussion. We moved to CA when I was in the 5th grade. Interestingly, the CA school district wanted to put bump me up a grade--rural SW Washington schools in Pasco, WA must have been pretty solid back then.
Went to Modesto Junior College for a year 88-89, like the comedian Nate Barzgate...what a waste of time!?!?!? My GPA was 'W' for withdrawal...
BUT, tuition was $50 a semester. I remember FREAKING OUT about how expensive the books were--what a racket that system turned out to be.
I had never considered wanting to live anywhere else growing up. California had/has everything. After doing my best Jeff Spicoli impersonation for 4+ years, I joined the Army to get away from all my dope-smoking buddies. Needed to escape.
It is just so damn sad to see something so wonderful turn to shit. Heart breaking. I totally get the 'this is my home, my friends are here, family...'
I think every voter should be forced to take a civics exam, similar to the citizenship text any immigrant takes, before they are allowed to vote. Would probably trim the voter rolls by 85% among the leftists.
Maybe then CA, and the rest of the shitholes Leftism has wrought, can begin to repeal the madness, and get sensible ordinances/laws back on the books.
I really like your comparison to Grey Gardens, but I don't think it's only California.
The wokified world is only surviving because of the massive investments in the betterment of society and human progress made by past generations of serious people. We are no longer serious people. Everything that this new cohort of pink-haired, pierced, foul-mouthed, self-righteous, soi disant elites touches always ends up worse. It cannot be otherwise, because they are not wise, are not serious, are not smart, and are not thoughtful. Their moral compass is not anchored to anything transcendent. (Sorry for the mixed metaphor, it's still early, brain not yet fully functional.)
I’ve been saying this for years now: if San Francisco counterculture was actually still true counterculture, they would’ve turned into conservative, married, traditional Republicans.
Actually countercultural behavior is exhausting. Ask someone who was a homeschooler in the 90's. Or a young woman who choses to wear nothing but skirts or dresses. Or a young man who wears a visible cross everywhere. Or someone who refused to wear a mask in Nov, 2020. Or a parent who doesn't let her children have a smartphone. Or an Christian in India. Being countercultural is hard and costly and sometimes dangerous. Truly countercultural groups and people don't trumpet their behavior.
This. Non-trumpeted, non-elite-approved expression. Counter culture in the 80s just laughed at everything solid. And all the cool kids said “yeah!” 2024 dystopia is where 80s counter culture brought us.
Really? I was homeschooling my boys in the 80's and 90's and, at least where we were living at the time (northeast Pennsylvania), it wasn't a big deal even though there weren't many of us homeschooling back then. Now and again somebody would notice my kids were out and about during school hours and I'd explain what we were doing. Never had a negative comment from anyone. The neighborhood kids were envious though. We did not have a computer in the house until the youngest turned 18, cell phones were not yet a Big Thing then, but we wouldn't have let our kids have those, either.
It varied state by state at the time. It still does. I live in CA and the legality was very much in doubt then. HSLDA was formed for a reason during that time. Compared to now, when there are conventions, a flood of curriculum vendors, huge support groups, charter schools that will throw state money at you, and 5% of all children are homeschooled... it's still countercultural, but nearly as much as 30 years ago. Many homeschoolers back then tried to keep their heads down. In some countries (Germany for example) they still do. I'm glad you had a good experience, but I know many families who had a hard time.
I can assure you that not giving a child a smartphone today is one of the most countercultural things you can do.
I think it depends what kind of counterculture you are part of. If you’re homeschooling in a neighborhood where there are few fellow homeschoolers, it is definitely isolating, and, as you say, you acutely feel that counterculture. If you’re part of the Amish, or a Hasidic Jewish community, you are also counterculture, and aware of that when you’re outside your community, but you probably don’t feel it as acutely since you have your entire community to fall back on and your friends look and act like you. If you feel it every day and it’s uncomfortable, you probably will leave that way of life.
Agreed. Being countercultural is must easier in a group. Even the Russian dissidents sought out groups despite the huge risks in doing so. Solzhenitsyn himself said that most of us "aren't strong enough to stand on the street corner and speak the truth boldly". He's right.
I used to say the only reason to go to homeschool conventions was to remind myself that we weren't insane.
No one is actually normal. The norm is just a spot on the map of all human behavior floating in the average between all the deviations. Nobody actually lives there and forcing anyone to pretend they live there is totalitarian.
The left has managed an incredible trick of pretending to subvert norms while enforcing norms. They’ve managed to simultaneously destroy tolerance for inquiry into the unique and coopt the act of subversion. It’s a perfect trap where, no matter how unique and subversive you actually are, you are under constant threat of mob violence for not deviating to the point where the exemplar is supposed to live on the map.
This concept has been on my mind too. Goth and punk, for my generation, was against the norm; that’s the whole point! If you’re goth is mainstream you’re doing it all wrong folks.
Well, those things were then, yes, but the concept is always there. The concept of bucking the norm in the 90s, we called, Underground. We sought out something different than the mainstream. That seeking also lends itself to a massive creative force; if you can’t find the what you desire, you create it.
Millennial normie Ken puts on black dress, lets you know he's now the queen of goth, punk, alt, and trans and is going to be making sure your speech is compliant with mainstream social norms or you're totally out of the club. Normie Karen pipes up with "don't forget your mask!" Both are very sure they are now cool and respected by the counterculture and can finally cross that off the bucket list (next, they're trying the hip-hop!)
There are only a few safe and acceptable topics for our modern artist or writer or critic to address, if they want to ever have a career or a date, if they don't want to be buried under an avalanche of bigotry accusations, and if they want the world to know they're one of the Good People who reside on the Right Side of History™.
Ther first of course is the 21st century's most popular theme, the Hero's Journey of our time: The Self and its Victimization.
If you're a member of an "unrepresented group" this narrative writes itself: you sing the blues about your people and its many sufferings, up to and including the time a kid in school touched your hair or mispronounced your name, and get to be treated like a radical rebel/prophet delivering urgent and necessary wisdom to the benighted bigots of America;
for women, it's about the evils of that Satan called the patriarchy, which has stomped and splained all over your self-esteem and which exists to make you a Handmaiden, no matter how many houses or trust funds your dad gave you.
But if you don't have the right Identity for this, the next best thing is to be stunning and brave and create a work about the evils of capitalism, while asking your fans to click like and subscribe and begging for a donation from one of our many philanthropic foundations, all founded on the fortunes of our evil capitalist class.
Either way the product is never not the same: Agitprop devoid of wisdom or imagination, designed to deliver the same stale political message about the evils of the past and the glorious future that awaits if we all agree to think the same thoughts and share the same exalted morality as our enlightened liberal clerisy.
Esthetics and vision and craft are dangerous oppressive impositions under the reign of Social Justice, especially as all the Good People know art should always be social work and about spreading a soothing balm of self-esteem on the many wounds of the marginalized. Only bigots disagree!
Our supposed nonconformists are as bright, creative, joyous and original as the Soviet Politburo, who actually might be their closest antecedent.
But isn’t that the point? No really great artist was ever famous while they were alive. The greatest, most provocative pieces were created by souls who were suffering immensely. Art is simply the reflection of emotion, and none is stronger than pain.
Of course a suffering soul is where art starts but presenting that suffering without craft, skill, imagination and the creation of a work larger than "I suffer, therefore society must be to blame" is like serving a dinner from the ingredients without bothering to cook or prepare an actual dish. Scolding political moralism may "send a message" but it doesn't lead often to crafting living breathing works that outlive their moment and inspire a wide range of thought and feeling in an audience.
Also, off the top of my head, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Goethe, Voltaire, Tolstoy, Dickens, Wagner, Chopin and George Sand, Picasso, Hemingway, Nabokov, Twain, etc etc were all quite famous while they were alive.
In parallel news, Shakespeare's Globe theater in London is experiencing a hurricane of criticism from disabled actors because the woman who has been cast as Richard III is not disabled. I feel like this is Goth, but it could be punk.
What does a ideology bent on liberating people from all social norms do when it becomes the dominant social norm? It eats itself. And that's what we're watching today.
Until maybe 10-15 years ago I thought 'artistic' and 'creative' were synonymous. I draw like a T-Rex with little arms, when I try to sing women and children begin to scream, cry, and run away, never learned an instrument, don't even paint walls very well--suffice it to say I never saw myself as artistic (truth).
That is after a few businesses, a non-profit, and numerous innovations (a foreign language 'immersion' program, a web-based language training program called 'LingFit'--mash up of CrossFit principles and language training) still never poked the veneer I wrapped around my own self image. I wasn't creative.
Oh, I also thought most artists were weirdos...so that helped maintain my prejudice.
It was when I watched the movie "Crash" back in 2007 that I finally, finally, finally understood the importance of art. It was when Sandra Bullock began screaming at Brendon Frazier about the 'gansta who is gonna sell our keys to his homies' that I began to sob and see my own biases.
The beauty of art, in all of its many forms--fiction, TV/movies, music, museum-ish art (sculpture, paintings), is the reader/watcher/listener willfully suspends his own skepticism, his own disbelief, to fall into the story--and then Art delivers truth bombs straight to the solar plexus.
Artists have been our present day prophets. They see through the veil, and try to communicate these infinite truths to the rest of us who are more interested in the venal/material attractions/distractions of life.
Art and sports--they are the same thing--who man can be at his best--are what define humanity. They bring us together. They challenge our assumptions. They his us square between the eyes with truth...
...Until, that is, that Trump, #Me-Too, and COVID broke the brains of the left (historically from where 95% of our artists originate). I wrote that triumvirate broke AWFL yesterday, but it is the entire left. Sam Harris. Nuff Said.
Maybe the right, new right--classical liberals, those without a woke mind virus--need to recognize that we're all creative. I believe that is what God meant when he said, "Made in our image". We are creators.
Chris is a creative. All the posters here are creatives. We need to restore art to its critically important place in our lives--it must challenge us, it must make us cry, it often should make us feel ashamed---THE LAST THING ART SHOULD DO IS ENCOURAGE COMPLIANCE!
I spoke with an “artist” who took shower hair and arranged it in circles and dyed it. She actually had a show where she displayed it. She had no idea that the work was more evidence of the decline of civilization than any demonstration of art.
The powers that be had to get ahold of counter-culture to keep their world domination plan going. I've been counter my whole life, I could feel the change starting to happen when Hipster became a thing. The cool artsy cities that I loved became the cool place to be. "They" sucked the soul out of punk....or being different....or whatever you want to call it. It's ok, us real ones just had to go deeper.
Artists who were "militantly gay and explicitly Marxist." I'd assumed that from the art, and all I could think of was "Weimar Germany." Some say the denouement this time might be even worse.
On Blaze TV, just out today, Chris Bray bitchin' about California:
https://twitter.com/BlazeTV/status/1752461731283030414
Full episode here:
https://youtu.be/CYDnuDuF5LU?si=IESAJh0vkb_wpsdf
"A conversation about nothing at all". Nailed it.
By believing that utopias can be functional, they've created a dystopia....out of nothing but hot air.
First time I've listened to Zero Hour. I love that Blaze has recognized your talent!
Interesting discussion. We moved to CA when I was in the 5th grade. Interestingly, the CA school district wanted to put bump me up a grade--rural SW Washington schools in Pasco, WA must have been pretty solid back then.
Went to Modesto Junior College for a year 88-89, like the comedian Nate Barzgate...what a waste of time!?!?!? My GPA was 'W' for withdrawal...
BUT, tuition was $50 a semester. I remember FREAKING OUT about how expensive the books were--what a racket that system turned out to be.
I had never considered wanting to live anywhere else growing up. California had/has everything. After doing my best Jeff Spicoli impersonation for 4+ years, I joined the Army to get away from all my dope-smoking buddies. Needed to escape.
It is just so damn sad to see something so wonderful turn to shit. Heart breaking. I totally get the 'this is my home, my friends are here, family...'
I think every voter should be forced to take a civics exam, similar to the citizenship text any immigrant takes, before they are allowed to vote. Would probably trim the voter rolls by 85% among the leftists.
Maybe then CA, and the rest of the shitholes Leftism has wrought, can begin to repeal the madness, and get sensible ordinances/laws back on the books.
bsn
If California de-shitifies, it won't be quick. It'll take a generation of change. But.
I really like your comparison to Grey Gardens, but I don't think it's only California.
The wokified world is only surviving because of the massive investments in the betterment of society and human progress made by past generations of serious people. We are no longer serious people. Everything that this new cohort of pink-haired, pierced, foul-mouthed, self-righteous, soi disant elites touches always ends up worse. It cannot be otherwise, because they are not wise, are not serious, are not smart, and are not thoughtful. Their moral compass is not anchored to anything transcendent. (Sorry for the mixed metaphor, it's still early, brain not yet fully functional.)
Agreed. California is the leading edge of the madness, but the madness is global.
I’ve been saying this for years now: if San Francisco counterculture was actually still true counterculture, they would’ve turned into conservative, married, traditional Republicans.
Actually countercultural behavior is exhausting. Ask someone who was a homeschooler in the 90's. Or a young woman who choses to wear nothing but skirts or dresses. Or a young man who wears a visible cross everywhere. Or someone who refused to wear a mask in Nov, 2020. Or a parent who doesn't let her children have a smartphone. Or an Christian in India. Being countercultural is hard and costly and sometimes dangerous. Truly countercultural groups and people don't trumpet their behavior.
This. Non-trumpeted, non-elite-approved expression. Counter culture in the 80s just laughed at everything solid. And all the cool kids said “yeah!” 2024 dystopia is where 80s counter culture brought us.
Ask someone who was a homeschooler in the 90's.
Really? I was homeschooling my boys in the 80's and 90's and, at least where we were living at the time (northeast Pennsylvania), it wasn't a big deal even though there weren't many of us homeschooling back then. Now and again somebody would notice my kids were out and about during school hours and I'd explain what we were doing. Never had a negative comment from anyone. The neighborhood kids were envious though. We did not have a computer in the house until the youngest turned 18, cell phones were not yet a Big Thing then, but we wouldn't have let our kids have those, either.
It varied state by state at the time. It still does. I live in CA and the legality was very much in doubt then. HSLDA was formed for a reason during that time. Compared to now, when there are conventions, a flood of curriculum vendors, huge support groups, charter schools that will throw state money at you, and 5% of all children are homeschooled... it's still countercultural, but nearly as much as 30 years ago. Many homeschoolers back then tried to keep their heads down. In some countries (Germany for example) they still do. I'm glad you had a good experience, but I know many families who had a hard time.
I can assure you that not giving a child a smartphone today is one of the most countercultural things you can do.
I think it depends what kind of counterculture you are part of. If you’re homeschooling in a neighborhood where there are few fellow homeschoolers, it is definitely isolating, and, as you say, you acutely feel that counterculture. If you’re part of the Amish, or a Hasidic Jewish community, you are also counterculture, and aware of that when you’re outside your community, but you probably don’t feel it as acutely since you have your entire community to fall back on and your friends look and act like you. If you feel it every day and it’s uncomfortable, you probably will leave that way of life.
Agreed. Being countercultural is must easier in a group. Even the Russian dissidents sought out groups despite the huge risks in doing so. Solzhenitsyn himself said that most of us "aren't strong enough to stand on the street corner and speak the truth boldly". He's right.
I used to say the only reason to go to homeschool conventions was to remind myself that we weren't insane.
The current counterculture involves everyone having very similar tattoos and piercings.
Except that it isn't counter anymore.
Precisely.
Sheep are always sheep.
Sheep are always sheep.
Ah, the way it used to be!
No one is actually normal. The norm is just a spot on the map of all human behavior floating in the average between all the deviations. Nobody actually lives there and forcing anyone to pretend they live there is totalitarian.
The left has managed an incredible trick of pretending to subvert norms while enforcing norms. They’ve managed to simultaneously destroy tolerance for inquiry into the unique and coopt the act of subversion. It’s a perfect trap where, no matter how unique and subversive you actually are, you are under constant threat of mob violence for not deviating to the point where the exemplar is supposed to live on the map.
This is brilliant
where the "safe spaces" are irl the most vicious guilt-as-weapon conformity bludgeon zones ever conceived.
I couldn’t have said that. It’s brilliant.
Turns out, there was value in square culture actually being square.
Right? For everyone, even the people who lived in "opposition" to it while reaping the benefits of a stable culture.
Especially so for the ‘outsiders’. Even the black sheep at least have earth under their feet; not so the lemmings.
This concept has been on my mind too. Goth and punk, for my generation, was against the norm; that’s the whole point! If you’re goth is mainstream you’re doing it all wrong folks.
My question is how people in 2024 can think that a subculture from 1978 is cool and cutting edge.
Well, those things were then, yes, but the concept is always there. The concept of bucking the norm in the 90s, we called, Underground. We sought out something different than the mainstream. That seeking also lends itself to a massive creative force; if you can’t find the what you desire, you create it.
Millennial normie Ken puts on black dress, lets you know he's now the queen of goth, punk, alt, and trans and is going to be making sure your speech is compliant with mainstream social norms or you're totally out of the club. Normie Karen pipes up with "don't forget your mask!" Both are very sure they are now cool and respected by the counterculture and can finally cross that off the bucket list (next, they're trying the hip-hop!)
There are only a few safe and acceptable topics for our modern artist or writer or critic to address, if they want to ever have a career or a date, if they don't want to be buried under an avalanche of bigotry accusations, and if they want the world to know they're one of the Good People who reside on the Right Side of History™.
Ther first of course is the 21st century's most popular theme, the Hero's Journey of our time: The Self and its Victimization.
If you're a member of an "unrepresented group" this narrative writes itself: you sing the blues about your people and its many sufferings, up to and including the time a kid in school touched your hair or mispronounced your name, and get to be treated like a radical rebel/prophet delivering urgent and necessary wisdom to the benighted bigots of America;
for women, it's about the evils of that Satan called the patriarchy, which has stomped and splained all over your self-esteem and which exists to make you a Handmaiden, no matter how many houses or trust funds your dad gave you.
But if you don't have the right Identity for this, the next best thing is to be stunning and brave and create a work about the evils of capitalism, while asking your fans to click like and subscribe and begging for a donation from one of our many philanthropic foundations, all founded on the fortunes of our evil capitalist class.
Either way the product is never not the same: Agitprop devoid of wisdom or imagination, designed to deliver the same stale political message about the evils of the past and the glorious future that awaits if we all agree to think the same thoughts and share the same exalted morality as our enlightened liberal clerisy.
Esthetics and vision and craft are dangerous oppressive impositions under the reign of Social Justice, especially as all the Good People know art should always be social work and about spreading a soothing balm of self-esteem on the many wounds of the marginalized. Only bigots disagree!
Our supposed nonconformists are as bright, creative, joyous and original as the Soviet Politburo, who actually might be their closest antecedent.
But isn’t that the point? No really great artist was ever famous while they were alive. The greatest, most provocative pieces were created by souls who were suffering immensely. Art is simply the reflection of emotion, and none is stronger than pain.
Of course a suffering soul is where art starts but presenting that suffering without craft, skill, imagination and the creation of a work larger than "I suffer, therefore society must be to blame" is like serving a dinner from the ingredients without bothering to cook or prepare an actual dish. Scolding political moralism may "send a message" but it doesn't lead often to crafting living breathing works that outlive their moment and inspire a wide range of thought and feeling in an audience.
Also, off the top of my head, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Goethe, Voltaire, Tolstoy, Dickens, Wagner, Chopin and George Sand, Picasso, Hemingway, Nabokov, Twain, etc etc were all quite famous while they were alive.
In parallel news, Shakespeare's Globe theater in London is experiencing a hurricane of criticism from disabled actors because the woman who has been cast as Richard III is not disabled. I feel like this is Goth, but it could be punk.
Sounds like 💩 to me 😉
curious of the panderverse rules here. user guide needed.
Has there ever been anything so retarded AND "1930's" DANGEROUS, at the same time, as masking?
I'm laying down the gauntlet.
Hipsters and Punks in masks ahahahaha stop! Stop! I'll wet meself!!! "You have only 10 minutes to rebel, the bus leaves in 15"!
Remember The Wild One? "What are you rebelling against, Johnny"?
A) Waddaya got? Ayyyyy 👍👍
Rage Against Loss of Hair lost it bigtime.
What does a ideology bent on liberating people from all social norms do when it becomes the dominant social norm? It eats itself. And that's what we're watching today.
Please, God, let it continue.
Until maybe 10-15 years ago I thought 'artistic' and 'creative' were synonymous. I draw like a T-Rex with little arms, when I try to sing women and children begin to scream, cry, and run away, never learned an instrument, don't even paint walls very well--suffice it to say I never saw myself as artistic (truth).
That is after a few businesses, a non-profit, and numerous innovations (a foreign language 'immersion' program, a web-based language training program called 'LingFit'--mash up of CrossFit principles and language training) still never poked the veneer I wrapped around my own self image. I wasn't creative.
Oh, I also thought most artists were weirdos...so that helped maintain my prejudice.
It was when I watched the movie "Crash" back in 2007 that I finally, finally, finally understood the importance of art. It was when Sandra Bullock began screaming at Brendon Frazier about the 'gansta who is gonna sell our keys to his homies' that I began to sob and see my own biases.
The beauty of art, in all of its many forms--fiction, TV/movies, music, museum-ish art (sculpture, paintings), is the reader/watcher/listener willfully suspends his own skepticism, his own disbelief, to fall into the story--and then Art delivers truth bombs straight to the solar plexus.
Artists have been our present day prophets. They see through the veil, and try to communicate these infinite truths to the rest of us who are more interested in the venal/material attractions/distractions of life.
Art and sports--they are the same thing--who man can be at his best--are what define humanity. They bring us together. They challenge our assumptions. They his us square between the eyes with truth...
...Until, that is, that Trump, #Me-Too, and COVID broke the brains of the left (historically from where 95% of our artists originate). I wrote that triumvirate broke AWFL yesterday, but it is the entire left. Sam Harris. Nuff Said.
Maybe the right, new right--classical liberals, those without a woke mind virus--need to recognize that we're all creative. I believe that is what God meant when he said, "Made in our image". We are creators.
Chris is a creative. All the posters here are creatives. We need to restore art to its critically important place in our lives--it must challenge us, it must make us cry, it often should make us feel ashamed---THE LAST THING ART SHOULD DO IS ENCOURAGE COMPLIANCE!
bsn
You're not punk, goth or alt if you stopped masking in public spaces, you're human.
I spoke with an “artist” who took shower hair and arranged it in circles and dyed it. She actually had a show where she displayed it. She had no idea that the work was more evidence of the decline of civilization than any demonstration of art.
Right?
The powers that be had to get ahold of counter-culture to keep their world domination plan going. I've been counter my whole life, I could feel the change starting to happen when Hipster became a thing. The cool artsy cities that I loved became the cool place to be. "They" sucked the soul out of punk....or being different....or whatever you want to call it. It's ok, us real ones just had to go deeper.
Artists who were "militantly gay and explicitly Marxist." I'd assumed that from the art, and all I could think of was "Weimar Germany." Some say the denouement this time might be even worse.