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Aesthetic Gammas or the Artistic Lumpenproletariat

In weeks (probably not), months and years to come I fully intend to post essays that will discuss the objectivity of artistic quality – not as clear cut or indifferent a subject as some may think – or worse defend the artistic quality of certain works hitherto reviled by the lesbo left and moralizing academic faggots (aided by their fellow travelers in the popular media). But because college boys and Bermuda shorted suburban dads may seize upon this issue to secure their belief that their precious Nancy & Sluggo or NFL halftime spectaculars are somehow comparable to that there French museum junk (Much like Xtians and other religionists are apt to seize upon and thereby discourage serious disagreement about the validity of a given scientific theory or the general concept of scientific objectivity (“Didn’t Einstein say that everything is relative? Therefore god exists if I say so. Gotcha there!”) as a way of enriching their priests and promoting their hateful ideology, a slick maneuver that has the equally pernicious effect of hardening the outlook of working empirical scientists such that they may take refuge in a kind of naïve realism in the face of sincere philosophically motivated skepticism), I want to point out here that it will not be my intention to validate the aesthetic worth of a lifetime spent at the backyard grille humming Goodbye Columbus in one’s quarter acre of Ventura County heaven. (The previous sentence is intentionally entortillé in the wistful expectation that the aforementioned dads and grads will give up in illiterate despair somewhere in the middle of a parenthesis and perhaps console themselves in the smug myth that I’m difficult, nay impossible to understand.) Though there may very possibly be no ultimate expressible objective criterion or even necessarily valid estimation of individual works of art or literature such that any work can with complete security be called good or bad, there is nevertheless a criterion for identifying gammas. Members of this human subspecies fetishize some small segment of artistic phenomena, such as is often the only portion available during their formative years and is often misleadingly identified with misnamed popular culture. They not only reject anything else as artistically unworthy, they usually don’t spend much time with any kind of art and literature. They are satisfied if they take in enough “entertainment” to fill the empty moments between fressen und rammeln. What they do ingest is limited in scope and largely consists in endless repetitions of the same thing. They exhibit limited capacity for pleasure and limited curiosity. They often say they would like to read but they just don’t have the time. They equate sports and its lessons of violent piety and competitive happy endings with true art. When challenged they use the indeterminacy of objective judgment as a basis for believing that their kitsch is as good as anything else. They avoid any art or literature that involves mental effort, opting for entertainment that is simply distracting, a characteristic not inconsistent with its power to strongly stimulate their otherwise dull and undifferentiated emotional makeup. I do consider these Untermenschen to be biologically less developed just as people who cannot perform mathematical calculations are in a sense not as developed as the scientifically gifted. But live and let live. As long as they do not impose their underdeveloped mental habits on others or get in the way of the creation of good works (in fact, a demand both critical and in constant danger of being contravened) they are somewhat harmless if annoying. Someone has to dig life’s ditches. But political correctness should not prevent us from understanding that some subspecies of humanity are simply unqualified to render aesthetic judgment. Consider the individual whose highest pleasure is to suck his thumb while watching football on the teevee. Or the ninny who doesn’t have time to read because she’s too busy shitting and breeding. These are the gammas, human cattle whose value is to fill certain functions in the economy but concerning whom the question is not whether their tastes are of any value but rather whether they should be allowed to vote. There is a human hierarchy, but let me be clear. The fellow cleaning the toilets down at the gym is not necessarily a gamma. Indeed the rest of the world (or at least the alphas and betas in the rest of the world) has discovered to its wonder and delight since Picasso and the work of pioneering anthropologists that the Amazonian and Olympic rain forests, the islands of Oceania and the coasts of West Africa are (rather, were) filled with individuals (or perhaps communities) touched with the highest artistic and poetic genius. (Sadly no one can say this about the Philippines, as culturally degraded a nation as any on earth. Try to imagine the glories of English cuisine extended to entire culture and you'll get the idea.) Reciprocally our colleges and graduate schools are filled with gammas. Certain gammas have superficial proficiencies, but so do computers and racing cars. Almost all academic faggots are gammas, but let this paragraph serve as a caution that my attacks on academic faggotry, the lesbo left and academe in general are not meant as an appreciation of the cultural level of the strip mall grisette.

I suppose if this essay were ever fortunate enough to find an audience eventually a rock band will emerge that calls itself The Gammas or perhaps The Aesthetic Lumpenproletariat.

Goodnight Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!