Against Sorrow Porn

We have not got time for misplaced sadness

This article by The Prudentialist https://im1776.com/2022/08/02/everywhere-at-the-end-of-the-west/ has been shared around on a few channels I follow and so I gave it a read. Frankly there are some things to take issue with as well as some more general observations to make.

The first is more of an observation - this piece opens with a discussion of a recent viral video of an aged American Veteran crying as he talks about what has been lost. It then transitions to an overview of a musician called ‘The Caretaker’ and a genre of music that sounds to me at any rate the exact opposite of a vitalist healthy art. The musician produces albums that attempt to convey what it is like to have Alzheimers, degenerative memory loss. Not only that but we learn there is a whole sub-genre and cult following of people on YouTube creating such music and the comments are what one would expect

Sorrow porn.

Art serves a function as a way to relate to that to which we struggle to at times. Sometimes the sorrow present in a poem, song, or painting can capture a feeling we once had or held. Yet of course when paired with modern excess we see the consumption problem. It becomes a sickness in itself - after all these people are consuming a form of horror in essence to ‘feel something’. Truly that is a sad state of affairs, the rose tinted view here and one-sided sorrow porn I also find at odds with reality. The reality of dealing with an elder with dementia is also irritation and frustration. The sad part is not just their decay but the burden they continue to place, and because death is so feared we strive for long to keep them alive as confused empty memory shattered husks.

The next part of this essay though is where I start to take more issues with how this is framed.

Memory loss as a medical condition - Alzheimers. Something we don’t fully understand and continue to struggle with. It feels unknown.

The Prudentialist equates this with what is happening in the West, though really he means America. Quote

“The body of the nation, and by extension the West, has already undergone significant mental decline in its loss of ability to remember. Our higher mental faculties no longer function. Culture, art and literature, are all disappearing in the haze of an uncertain recollection.”

This paints a picture that these things are just disappearing because we don’t remember them.

I argue this is not true.

They are being deliberately buried by those opposed to the essence of the West. This is not some hand-wringing sorrowful condition sweeping through us like a plague. Many of us have witnessed the direct destruction and attack and attempted burial of our culture, art, literature and traditions. Our enemies control what is displayed in our art galleries and museums and the text that accompanies these pieces. There is no mystery here.

Prudentialist’s argument appears to that because we move further from the ‘based’ past and have less people who actually know what it was like to live in a time when people left their doors unlocked we are at a loss to what it is to be of the West. This has an appeal but it paints a bit too grim picture that does not touch on the real traditions kept alive and survive, nor does it account for again the very real destructive active forces that have been tearing at our society.

Many people feel a sense of unease as time moves on and things get worse - take the problem of gun violence in schools in America. There are plenty of people who remember a time before that, there are fewer who remember an active healthy gun culture yes but the sense that something is very wrong is not going away. The progressive paradox can be summed up by: better smart phones but worse and worse roads. The loss of memory is not a mysterious thing that has just happened. It has been part of a deliberate movement to disconnect people from their past and ability to know what is good and right.

We are not as helpless as that veteran or the alzheimers patient. We are the vanguard who understand what is happening and why it is happening and many work to preserve and rekindle what they are attempting to bury and destroy.

One example to take hope from and look to as an example of both active remembering and continuation of the Wests spirit would be the re-enactment community as a whole. The re-enactors that most people might be aware of would of course be American Civil War re-enactors. Our progressive media overlords occasionally like to glare at the Southern ones in particular and mutter about how bad it is - yet this hobby and passion never dies. Americans of all stripes flock to see these re-enactments and there are large scale historically accurate depictions of this all over the South.

On a recent trip myself to a Western Fort I was delighted to see a re-enactment group present. They were firing off a mountain howitzer and these amateur historians gave a riveting speech on the use and a live (blank fire) demonstration. This is of course about remembering but it sparks in all watching a fire. This is part of the Wests history in this small place we are closer to that spirit of the frontier. As I hung back to chat with the lead historian a local guy was eagerly expressing his desire to get a uniform and take part in the next one - truly a heart warming sight to see.

If you take a look on YouTube for long enough you’ll also come across Townsends. This channel is perhaps most famous for recreating early American food dishes - again this is reviving long lost culinary traditions and connecting people to the past. This content is devoured by people, Townsends themselves also have many videos around creating frontier or early American homesteads and other techniques. They sell goods for the budding re-enactor or just enthusiast to use. One of my good friends makes spruce beer because of it. This is not just memory this is the essence of the West.

Far from putting this part of history into a dustbin or an old persons home people out there are keeping it alive and it is not just the surface level. The Prudentialist wonders about what it means to be The West - what is going on in those re-enactment camps IS part of that spirit in a much closer real and tangible sense than can ever be written about. Living and immersive history continues to preserve the spirit of the West in spite of everything.

There is no time for sorrow porn about this or pretending we aren’t quite sure what is happening or how it can be halted.