We Do Not Support Poor Joel Stein

We resolved, partly because there is little happiness anywhere associated with the subject, not to pile on poor, clueless, gratitude-impaired Joel Stein. But one of our more excitable correspondents discovered "The Voice of the Neuter is Heard Throughout the Land," Vandeurleun's essay on Stein's performance while being interviewed by Hugh Hewitt in the wake of Stein's  "I don't support our troops" LA Times venture. Then he followed it with a comment of his own:   

Stein's way of speaking thus observed is part of the demeanor and mimetics that unveil to our unprepared eyes a genuinely new and uncharted social contract in this country. Thank goodness someone's paying attention to the non-verbal part. In the little bit I could stomach of Stein's interview with Hewitt, Stein's conversational dirge is the polar opposite of the questioning-upnote that women used to be mocked for, that implicit "what do you think? Am I right? Am I acceptable? Will this do?" 

In Stein's voice, the down-note, the "dying fall" -- historically linked in Twelfth Night with a declining Dowlandesque melody, now so tempting for metaphor that the technical musical data has disappeared from easy reference. Anyway, that down-note at the end of every Stein sentence reads auditorily as a signal of "we're done. don't approach, don't look for an entry point, don't connect. I'm walking dead."

It makes sense one would move to Zombie through Genderless, this is what the Church has been talking about in the many ramifications of sexuality and the Culture of Death. The Pope's very recent encyclical -- God is Charity -- on redeeming Eros (he didn't get around to Philea, yet) has some resounding notes.

The other piece of a thesis is the demeanor manifesting the unremitted grief of upcoming generations. Families fragment; Boomer parents have remained bigger-than-life, oversexed, pretentious, touchy passion-ridden kids; God is dead; and survivor guilt rumbles sotto voce echoing around the sibling cohorts that have been poisoned, dismembered, scraped and flushed in thirty million approved and routine abortions in this country alone. Few contemporary toeholds of hope-in-life are offered by contemporary art, religion, or achievement and its rewards.

Horrible, horrible that Stein could live in a bubble to think this discourse decent in any but his Duty-Free Shop. At the same time, one hears the most reprehensible Boomer quibblers, remembering how ghoulish their contemptuous response to the Viet veterans made them appear, cosmeticizing their position into a rote, lockstep, "I don't support the war but I support the troops." To have reacted to this false note is the one thing in Stein's favor.

And what is wrong with capitulation in a few years to terrorists and dhimmitude? For the walking dead, the sooner Armageddon comes and wipes away "my world" and those alternately moaning and self-satisfied progressives in "my bubble" who have sold me such poison pottage, the better, the sweeter the oblivion. What...ever.

If Stein's tone were simply power-hungry, or greedy, or angry, there would be some hope for him and his. But irony has calcified here into a blow-dried rough beast. The cosmic mouse trap bait that inescapably and, in the end, beneficently, seduced earlier generations into engaging life -- a hunger for material necessities, sex, desire for learning and potency and dominion -- has been served-on-a-platter to these kids before they have even asked -- the goodies  expertly stripped of the numinous, the beautiful or excellent, or their substantial historical elements. Eminem is as good as Shakespeare or Mozart.  They have been fed on the metaphysical equivalent of styrofoam Twinkies. They are replete, and briefly satisfied. The wines have a European pedigree and were reviewed in the Times.

God help us all in their restless post-prandial wanderings, as they beat back the bounds of the formerly shocking.