The Met Gala happened on Monday night.
Every single year, the Met Gala is a display straight from Panem in “The Hunger Games.” People dress in idiotic costumes. It is the height of culture, with people who are showing “fashion” to the rest of society, which usually means androgyny. People dress like shower curtains and all of the rest.
But there was something that was kind of fascinating about this year’s Met Gala, and that was the theme, which was “Garden of Time.” It was based on a 1962 short story by an author named J.G. Ballard, who considered himself a political moderate.
The story of “Garden of Time” is about a couple stuck in the past. They play Mozart, they dress in very fancy outfits, and they live in a walled garden estate.
Across the horizon they can see a mob approaching. In order to stop the mob, they use flowers from a magical garden. They can snip off flowers from this magical garden and essentially pause the mob and its attempts to take over the mansion and destroy everything. But the garden is decreasing in the number of flowers it has; it has a set number of flowers, and the worse things go, the more flowers have to get snipped off.
At the end of the story, the couple turn into statues and the mansion is overrun. A segment from the short story reads, “As the Mozart chimed delicately around him, flowing from his wife’s graceful hands, he saw that the advance column of an enormous army was moving slowly over the horizon. At first glance, the long ranks seemed to be progressing in orderly lines, but on closer inspection, it was apparent that, like the obscured detail of a Goya landscape, the army was composed of a vast throng of people, men and women, interspersed with a few soldiers in ragged uniforms, pressing forward in a disorganized tide.”
In this short story, the mob isn’t good. The mob is just the mob. The people who wall themselves off from humanity are not necessarily good either, but at least they’re cultured. At least these people like Mozart. They express love for one another. They have a solid marriage, but eventually, they end up being overrun.
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I’m not sure if the people who read this story or the people who decided on the theme at the Met Gala simply misinterpreted the story completely, thinking it to be about the fragility of nature — because it clearly is not. It is really about elite versus mob rule and the inability to bridge that gap.
That was really the story last night, not just because of the celebrity morons who put on exceptionally expensive outfits they will wear once to show off for the cameras, but also because right outside, there was a braying pro-Hamas anti-American mob.
And that juxtaposition is pretty telling about where we are in Western civilization right now.
The mob was knocking down barricades in an attempt to storm the Met Gala to make their point, which is generally anti-American. They don’t like the civilization in which they live.
The difference between the short story “Garden of Time” and last night’s Met Gala is that in the short story, the elites are actually opposed to the values of the mob. They listen to Mozart. They are very delicate in their sensibilities.
But the people who are now our celebrities are people who sympathize with the protesters, who clap for the protesters, who march for the protesters.
Why do they do that?
Because they believe they can co-opt them. This is also true of the leaders of the Democratic Party. This is why they refuse to dissociate from the anti-American protesters on college campuses.
They believe they can co-opt the mob. They believe if they can grab the reins of that runaway carriage, then they can somehow direct it in a direction they wish to go. That if they can re-channel that river of human sentiment and anger, they can direct it across the landscape in a way they wish to control.
They are wrong, and the revolution is going to eat them because the revolution always eats its own. It always eats the people who try to control the revolution.
For the people who are the heads of the Democratic Party, there is always a payoff involved. The payoff was always: If we give you part of what you want, then you will allow us to maintain control.
This has been true throughout the Democratic Party’s attempts to rule over the mob. It’s been true since the 1930s when the Democratic Party was attempting to channel social outrage at American capitalism toward the New Deal. It was true in the 1960s and 1970s when the Democratic Party was trying to channel outrage about the Vietnam War and civil rights, and the sexual revolution into their own program.
And it is true now when the Democratic Party is trying to channel the rage of the Black Lives Matter mob or the mass mob into electoral victory. There’s always the attempt: If we give you half of what you want, maybe you’ll vote for us and keep giving us the power.
The problem is, very often the mob is just wrong, which is something our Founding Fathers knew and why they did not like mob rule. That’s why the Founding Fathers built checks and balances into the American government.
Ever wonder why the Founding Fathers weren’t in favor of pure democracy? The answer is if there’s one thing they feared more than oligarchy, it was mob rule. They talk about it routinely in the Federalist Papers and in all their letters to one another.
They were not wrong because it turns out that mob rule is actually a terrible form of tyranny.
But the Democratic Party has attempted to channel this mob rule, and they’ve done so in part through economic payoffs. The bargain of the New Deal and of the Great Society programs of LBJ was: If we give you other people’s money, then you will allow us to maintain control of this runaway carriage.
LBJ described it as much in the 1960s, suggesting that all of the giant government programs were a sop to the revolutionary wing of his own party. If you paid them off enough, maybe they’d be quiet and support you when they go to the ballot box.
So the question becomes, what do you do with this mob? It turns out, when the elites play an inside/outside game with the mob, the mob eventually eats them.
In order to keep the mob going, which is what so many politicians and elites need in order to maintain power, they have to keep lying to them and teaching them lies and embedding those lies in every aspect of our educational system, which is what you are seeing coming to fruition right now.
When you decide to teach the mob that American systems are inherently racist and the West is inherently bad, what you get in the West is a crisis of the mob, and that mob has been created by an elite set of institutions that have been thoroughly taken over by people who despise the West and trained the mob in a particular way so they could channel them against the system itself.
And that is why there is such a lack of moral clarity in the West: No understanding of what values the West stands for, or even more importantly, what the West’s enemies stand for.