Sometimes I think His Majesty has become a bitter old Sith.

This morning His Majesty was reading all the newspaper columns declaring that this or that story was the story of the year.  I’m not sure whether it was the column declaring gay marriage to be the big story of the year — His Majesty naturally opposes gay marriage, inasmuch as he is against all marriage — or the column declaring economic recovery as the major story of the year, printed opposite a different column declaring the economic recovery to be largely a myth.

His monologue started out philosophically, in the colloquial sense.

I’m getting old, Lord Vader. I won’t be around much longer. But I take considerable delight in the many indications that Western civilization won’t be around much longer, either.

Consider all these frothy columns purporting to tell us what was significant this year. Virtually every one of them misses the mark — and those few that do touch on something of lasting significance completely misinterpret its significance.

I’m guessing the column on gay marriage falls in the latter category; the columnist was positively bubbly about this sign of continuing Western progress.

The ones that really put the sneer on your face are the ones purporting to debunk the continuing decline of the West. You have to be blind to fail to see the signs of cultural decay.

Nowhere is this clearer than the arts. Look at the review of this movie, set in the early 20th century: It received a PG-13 rating for sexual content, language, and — the horrors! — smoking.

Now, I live and believe in the Word of Wisdom. Though, to be sure, I couldn’t smoke if I wanted to. But I understand His Majesty’s point.

But our confused and misprioritized scheme for rating the suitability of movies for children isn’t really the same thing as “the arts”, is it?

You can take it to the bank that it was Hollywood itself that insisted that smoking should be included in the rating schemes. Part of it was doubtless a twisted form of prudery, but I can’t help thinking that part of it is deliberately making a laughingstock of rating standards, thus undermining them.

Then there’s this editorial calling for immigrants to receive the vote. We’re not taking here about people who come here and make this their country; they already receive the vote, after the requirements for naturalization are duly met. This professor — it’s always a professor — wants anyone who happens to be in the country at the time of an election to have a vote, and insists that this is the suffrage issue of our time.

I understand His Majesty’s scorn for the idea. His Majesty worked through the system to secure his own naturalization, and it wasn’t easy.  After his petition as a political refugee was denied — the bleeding-heart liberals at INS insisted on believing the new Republic was a regime that recognized basic human rights — he tried going the route of a EB1 Extraordinary Ability Petition, but had surprising difficulty finding anyone willing to write the letters of recommendation, even though being strong with the Force surely counts as an extraordinary ability. It took a couple of demonstrations; fortunately, the Force can have a strong influence on the bureaucratically minded.

Feh. We’ll come back to that another time. [Who is this “we”, Sithosabe?] There is so much more to say about the deterioration of the arts. I’m not even talking about the obvious stuff, the crucifixes in urine jars and elephant dung on paintings of the Mother of Christ, or even the artist who sold cans of his own feces at $37 a pop, which has now been inflated to €124,000 a pop. [No, really]. Avante garde has always been garbage and crap, even if it’s only in the last few decades that it has become literally garbage and crap.

It makes you wonder who is putting on whom, but it’s still a fringe phenomenon.

No, the art that matters, in the sense that it both reflects and shapes culture, is not the elite art produced and consumed by a statistically insignificant percentage of the population. It’s the popular art that really reflects the decay of a culture.

Who are today’s great musical artists? Taylor Twitt? Miley Virus? Justin Beaver? If you want to listen to halfway listenable music in the car, you have to tune in to an golden oldies station.

Well, now His Majesty is just ranting like any old man who thinks everything was better in its youth.

Look at your Jango list of preferred artists, Lord Vader. Are any of them under the age of 50?

To tell the truth, none of them are under the age of 60. But since I’m 52, this simply reflects the music that was playing when I was in my impressionable years.

No, the decay is real. The only popular artist still producing anything worth listening to is “Weird” Al Yankovic. And his greatest challenge is finding anything worth parodying. Most of his best music is actually better, in every meaningful measure, than the stuff it parodies. That is not a good sign. And he’s finding it increasingly difficult to get permission to do parodies, because the record labels have caught on that his parodies are better than what they’re marketing, and they don’t like it.

Then there’s the corruption of the visual arts. Go look at what they choose to stuff into a frame and sell at cheap home decoration stores.

He has a point. The last time I looked for paintings to decorate my meditation cube, I ended up picking up two Van Gogh reprints, a Starry Night and a Field with Poppies. Now, Van Gogh is a fine artist, but he hasn’t produced anything new in some time, seeing as how he offed himself over a century ago. I wish more of our contemporary artists would emulate his work. — Geez, I think His Majesty is starting to rub off on me.

It’s creeping into our architecture as well. There was nothing wrong with the suburban ranch home as a place to raise kids; it wasn’t lavish but it was good enough. Now you have commercials treating ordinary indoor plumbing as if it was a work of art — unconsciously, or perhaps not, echoing the Dadaist movement of not quite a century ago.

But it’s the grand architecture that really displays this. I mean, look at some of this crap.

It’s like a cross between Howard Roark, Hieronymus Bosch, and Hello Kitty.

Control yourself, Lord Vader. That mask isn’t designed for chuckling.

I could say the same about His Majesty, but only if I didn’t wish to live.

Then there’s science and engineering. Oh, sure, we know more than we did in the 1960s, but that’s only because it’s difficult to actually forget in a culture that mistakes book learning for education. I speak of the science and engineering colleges, of course; the humanities colleges don’t even bother with book learning, choosing instead an avante garde approach to the humanities in which students actually leave college stupider than when they enrolled.

Americans went to the Moon in the 1960s. They haven’t gotten beyond low Earth orbit since. The only humans who have ever walked on another world are now so old they need walkers to get around here on Earth.

We’ve had the Standard Model of Physics since the 1970s, and, so far, the only real improvement on the Standard Model in four decades is the discovery of neutrino mass — and that was staring us in the face since the Davis solar neutrino measurements, also in the 1970s. Our top physicists are puttering around with string theories that are either unfalsifiable or have already been falsified. They should really try their hand at determining how many angels can dance on a pinhead.

Real wealth has declined, too. You see it in our aging and inadequate infrastructure. There is a freeway in Pasadena that has been sitting unfinished for sixty years. Meanwhile, the best minds are either creating electronic toys that are only a substitute for real wealth, or figuring out better ways to separate the people creating electronics toys from their money.

Those electronic toys have opened a world of ideas to a great swath of the public. Not to mention their value in genealogy.

I know what you’re thinking, Lord Vader. [He always does.] You forget one of the few really trenchant sayings to emerge from the Internet: “I have a device in my pocket that gives me access to the sum of human knowledge. I use it to look at pictures of cats and argue with anonymous strangers.”

The Internet does indeed allow ideas to propagate faster than ever. The problem is that so many of the ideas are bad.

I have no particular interest in genealogy myself. Nor do 99.999% of Internet users. Meanwhile, it’s estimated that 13% of Internet searches are for pornography.

I post that link with some hesitation, since it names some porn sites. It does not directly link them, fortunately.

And I wonder if porn is really a measure of decay of culture. It seems to have always been with us. But perhaps I am unwise to confuse porn with erotica.

You must avoid that mistake. The classical world had erotica. It also had porn. You see the erotica displayed in museums and taught in schools. It’s less common to display or teach the actual pornography, such as some of the works of Petronius, which are definitely a product of the Roman Empire in its decay.

The genitalia are the most cruel and unfeeling of all idols.

And what is “reality TV” but a kind of mildly sanitized gladiatorial game? Only the lingering remnants of the Christian roots of Western culture are keeping this from being taken to its logical extreme.

There is a common thread behind all this, which I am hardly the first to identify. It is lack of cultural confidence. The folks at National Review have been preaching this to their insignificant little band for some time. You have a strong, vibrant culture, willing to take risks, only so long as both the leaders and the masses of that culture consider their culture something worth fighting for. There has never been a culture endowed with more worth fighting for than Western culture; it is deeply ironic that its own cultural elite has had the mind-boggling stupidity, or perhaps malice, to depict Western culture as uniquely deserving of condemnation. William Shirer once described the rise of Nazism in Germany as the triumph of the gutter. He hadn’t seen nothing yet.

Oddly, I share a lot of His Majesty’s views on the sorry state of our civilization and its likely imminent collapse. The difference is that I see this as an unavoidable preliminary to the triumph of the kingdom of Christ. Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.

His Majesty does not believe in Christ — does not believe in much of anything, actually, except the intellect, which I suppose makes him a committed idolater — and this makes his outlook unrelievedly bleak. I must say I’m deeply grateful for the alternative.

Incidentally, since none of you have asked: angina = Greek ?????? ankhon? (“strangling”). Appropriate in more ways than one.