Bush strikes blow in Culture War

President Bush Awards 2004 National Humanities Medals

I saw at Armavirumque that Bush awarded Hilton Kramer a National Humanities award. Don't know who that is? Well, that is not suprising since he has been a critic of Leftism and a proponent of objectivity for many years. Here is a snipet from First Things' review of his essay collection Twilight of the Intellectuals:

But it is when he turns to matters of art and aesthetics that Kramer’s strengths as a thinker come most fully into play. Though a host of his ideological enemies have branded him a "reactionary elitist" for his belief in objective aesthetic standards, Kramer is no Philistine. After half a century, he retains a qualified but genuine love for the achievements of modernism in art. For all of its contradictions and dead ends, modernism was a movement that cared about beauty, meaning, and the prophetic calling of the artist.

Kramer brings these commitments to bear on Susan Sontag in one of the best essays in the collection. In an unsparing dissection of Sontag’s famous 1964 essay "On Camp," Kramer sees this "pasionaria of style" to be the herald of our postmodern malaise. Sontag’s celebration of camp, with its fundamentally amoral vision ("the victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality,’ ‘irony’ over ‘tragedy’"), has gone hand–in–hand with the triumph of pop culture, the decay of standards, and the sort of blithe nihilism that dominates much of academia today.

Irving Kristol's wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, loved by us hated by them, also received an award. She has written about the virtues of Victorian Values; can't you just imagine the red faced liberals!

Finally, John R. Searle made the triple play. Notable now for his Philosophy of Mind, but worthy of special attention for his deconstruction of Deconstruction, his fight with the center of all literay evil, the now dead Derrida. From the New Criterion:

In 1977, for example, the philosopher John Searle wrote “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,” an attack on deconstruction that was devastating—we would have said “unanswerable,” except that Derrida instantly swung into print with a tenebrous piece of sophistry that would have been funny if it had not been in earnest. (“When I say that I do not know John R. Searle, that is not ‘literally’ ‘true.’ For that would seem to mean that I have never met him ‘in person,’ ‘physically,’ and yet I am not sure of that,” etc., etc.)

Among other things, Derrida’s response to Searle illustrated the Janus-faced character of deconstruction. For Derrida’s followers, deconstruction was a weapon, an instrument of subversion.

We are winning the war on terror. We are winning the political war. These victories, however, will be fleeting if we do not win the war of ideas. As Professor Liulevicius says. "Ideas have Consequences."