"Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My genes are blue," Sweeney says in one video, which crazy women on the Left have labeled Nazi propaganda.
Most conservatives are aware of the Left’s assaults on free speech on college campuses, and have noted the similarities between the Red Chinese Cultural Revolution’s “struggle sessions” and the ritual defamation and apology cycles the Leftist media and academia impose on individuals who transgress the party-approved ideology on various issues; gender, man-made climate change and race being only the three most obvious.
These are not passing tempests in academia but assaults on the foundations of Western Civilization and culture. These are the ideals first propounded by the ancient Greeks before Greek became a written language in the 8th century BC, which found their first expression in the foundational document of Western culture, Homer’s epic poem The Iliad.
Democratic decision-making, the commitment to personal excellence, freedom of speech, meritocracy vs hierarchy, heroic ideals of self-sacrifice and loyalty, our Western ideas of masculine and feminine beauty and their place in our culture, and many more values and ideas all trace to the ancient Greeks and in a replay of Red China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, all these Western “bourgeois” influences are to be replaced with “pure” Maoist-Marxist ideals and values.
Among the many destructive assaults on the Homeric ideals underpinning Western Civilization, the attack on the ideals of beauty and striving for and rewarding personal excellence are some of the most dangerous.
The Left’s latest front in the American Cultural Revolution is one on our ideas of feminine and masculine beauty and health being mounted not by government or academia, but by Maoist Red Guards in “woke” Marxist corporations, legacy news outlets and social media.
Who, or what, will replace the ideal beauty of Helen of Troy – the face that launched 1,000 ships, and the graceful beauty of Athena, or that of Aphrodite, infinitely desirable but infinitely out of reach? And who, or what, does the Left have in mind to replace the fierce physicality of Hercules and Achilles or the physical perfection of Apollo?
The trendsetting “Glamour” magazine decided that the masculine ideal is no longer the healthy, muscular athlete that has been the Western ideal male for some 3,000 years – it is now the “pregnant male.”
Likewise trendsetting fashion brand Calvin Klein, previously noted for featuring acknowledged ideals of Western beauty, both male and female, has decided that the obese and the hairy and bearded “trans woman” should be the ideals to which we aspire.
No doubt some will criticize this as shallow – beauty, after all is only skin deep. But that misses the larger and deeper cultural point.
We all know that few will exactly mirror the ideal, but it is the aspiration to be our best, to strive to be as close to the ideal as we can become that is the point. As Pericles said in his famous Funeral Oration for the Athenian dead in the first year of the Peloponnesian War, “For where the prize is highest, there you will find the best and the bravest.”
So, for the past 3,000 years Western culture has told us if you are a skinny nerd or a plain Jane, look for something else to distinguish yourself. Be the chess champion, the debate team captain, or the tiger of the field hockey team.
But why strive if there is no ideal, no “highest” in anything?
If everyone and everything is of equal value to society what’s the point in being the best, in looking your best or accomplishing anything?
There is no point, is the point, as the Soviets discovered. If there is a false hierarchy of not what you know, but who you know, and all work – even the sloppiest – is rewarded equally, then why strive for perfection? Or even competence.
The inevitable result is a society where nothing works, and nobody cares enough to fix even the most obvious civic failures.
Historian Thomas Cahill, chronicling the decline and eventual failure of the ancient Greek world in the final chapter of Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter, observed that in the arts idealism was succeeded by realism, realism by jaded desire for momentary stimulation, and flagging desire by crabbed pessimism.
For at least two decades the Left has been pushing America ever closer to the abandonment of ideals in art, in personal grooming, conduct and values, in work, and in politics – in everything that has defined the West for the past 3,000 years.
The end result – the intended result – is a world of mediocre drabness bereft of beauty and excellence, and the kind of “crabbed pessimism” in which nothing matters, nothing is important, nothing is worth striving for, and nothing is worth defending.
Fortunately, in one of those unpredictable confluences of commerce and culture, Sidney Sweeney’s American Eagle jeans campaign has reminded us that pursuit of beauty and excellence still matter because they are fundamental to Western culture. Marxists and radical feminists will complain that this is a shallow “sex sells” take on culture, but in a free society their “crabbed pessimism” will always lose to Sidney Sweeney and American Eagle, because when given the choice, people have always preferred to associate themselves with beauty and excellence, even if it is only by wearing the right jeans.
- Sidney Sweeney
- American Eagle
- Sydney Sweeney has great jeans
- radical feminism
- China cultural revolution
- liberal media
- gender
- climate change
- western civilization
- American culture
- feminine beauty
- Glamour Magazine
- Calvin Klein
