Last words on Miley Cyrus, the sordid, pathetic avatar of America’s pop culture

Miley Cyrus is an American tragedy.  By that, I don’t mean that she herself is tragic.  Of course, to the extent that she’s a young woman who’s been utterly corrupted by Hollywood, that’s an individual tragedy.  When I say she’s an “American tragedy,” though, I mean that she is emblematic of that sad state to which American culture has been reduced.

I wrote a couple of posts about Miley at Mr. Conservative and really don’t want to write about her anymore.  However, that doesn’t mean I’ll be so selfish that I won’t share other writers’ fine thoughts about her with you:

Camille Paglia:  “Subversion requires limits to violate. *** Pop is suffering from the same malady as the art world, which is stuck on the tired old rubric that shock automatically confers value. But those once powerful avant-garde gestures have lost their relevance in our diffuse and technology-saturated era, when there is no longer an ossified high-culture Establishment to rebel against. On the contrary, the fine arts are alarmingly distant or marginal to most young people today.”

Victor Davis Hanson:  This brilliant classicist sees a straight line between The Satyricon “about the gross and pretentious new Roman-imperial elite,” and Filner, Spitzer, the Kardashians, Miley, and the myriad other celebrities who demean themselves and who manage to demean us even more simply because we lack the moral decency to stop watching their perverse spectacles.  Thus, Miley knows that, gross though she was, she will profit economically from this publicity.  We may exclaim and express outrage but, en masse, Americans lack the will to turn their backs on her entirely.  If she comes out with a catchy dance tune, all will be forgiven.

Michelle Malkin:  Michelle does a flashback post which reminds us we shouldn’t it blame it all on Miley.  This Southern Christian girl wasn’t born that way (to quote Lady Gaga); instead, a star-stuck father and a corrupt entertainment system turned her to the dark side.  Which gets to my point above that, even as we decry this, we still buy movie tickets, watch TV, listening to music, etc., all of which funds this moral degradation.

Charles C.W. Cooke:  And of course, there’s always a racial spin.  Cooke looks at a crazed black racist at The Nation who tweeted out something that reminds us that, just as to a hammer everything is a nail, to a race obsessed person, everything is a racial attack:  “[Aura] Bogado ranged from the incomprehensible assertion that ‘White is the new Miley’ to the self-parodic confession that ‘Every time I see ‪@MileyCyrus slap that black woman’s butt, I think about the way that enslaved blacks were whipped for white entertainment.'”  “Progressives” — living in a delusional past and hating it, but incapable of recognizing modern reality.