It was written:
> >>But that's not all. Columbine High School was a pioneer in "Death
> >>Education," a mandatory course in the school. Rather than the stated
> >>purpose of teaching kids that death was part of life, the real
> >>intent, says The New Federalist, was, as with video games, to
> >>desensitize: "issues that are fundamental philosophical and moral
> >>issues cease to exist, and everything is one succession of sensory
> >>experiences that all lead you to abandon that which is essentially
> >>human in yourself."
Maybe someone can bring me up to speed... This New Federalist thing... I don't know a thing about "death courses" in Littleton, but courses up here in the North, when they pertain to death, are usually comparative - dealing with different conceptualizations of death, pastoral care, bereavement, the afterlife... the last thing in the world that it has to do with is desensitization... what... like if we talk about death and what it means, and talk about the mourning process... we'll become deadly? There's a piece of antidemocratic mysticism for you. The more we know about something and the more we talk about it, somehow, the worse it becomes (for us).
> >>Also guilty: The Frankfurt School. "Theodor Adorno was trained as a
> >>Classical musician in the 1920s in Germany, but was recruited to this
> >>project [of cultural and psychological warfare], in which the
> >>conscious objective was to destroy that which makes Western
> >>Civilization great, namely, the fundamental principles of
> >>Christianity, and he wrote and collaborated with others specifically
> >>on the idea that everything they did aimed to destroy Western
> >>Civilization.... And they said explicitly there could never be their
> >>kind of world-government revolution in the West until every aspect of
> >>Christianity had been destroyed...." Adorno, no friend of pop
> >>culture, nonetheless committed the earlier heresy of promoting
> >>Schonberg, "a postmodernist composer" who showed that human beings
> >>were irrational. Schonberg and Adorno turned people into murderers
> >>and necrophiliacs. Adorno's everywhere - music departments,
> >>Hollywood, everywhere.
Anyone who would describe Schoenberg as a postmodern composer is an idiot or, just happens to be using a concept in frankly trivial and unsophisticated way. That Schoenberg could be described as anything but modern is preposterous. Not to mention that anyone that would do this kind of reading must be completely unaware that Adorno knew his Freud, and knew it well. I have the feeling that this is the Willie Brandt F train all over again - WB described the FS as "architects of terrorism" - so I wonder if someone has been reading olde speeches... Anyway, Adorno's reading of Schoenberg is highly tied in with his understanding of psychoanalysis. Schoenberg's music is neurotic (filled with tension), in the Freudian sense (his music captures the antagonistic and sundered spirit of the enlightenment) while someone like Stravinsky is perverse (who traversed boundaries for the sake of traversing boundaries) (at least according to Adorno). I'm only pointing this out because it's one thing to think that someone is full of shit, and it's another thing to be able to explain why.
ken
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