Declinist Toys

Two excellent declinist items to report today, both are toys. Toys, I should not fail to mention, have historically been an accurate index of decline, as they often reveal what a culture imagines for its future. Two particularly distasteful toys have arrived on the market just in time for the holiday season:

1) First we have this absolutely delightful toy marketed by J.C. Penny called “Forward Command Post."



My feeling is that J.C. Penny should complete the series with a burnt out mosque in Mosul, an inoperative power generator erector set, and a C130 MREs Afgan drop kit. By the way, any guesses on what that piece of paper is covering the table on the second floor sun porch? It is most likely a map, but I like to fantasize that it’s the Utne Reader left there by Richard Perle, who just dropped in from Provence to see how nicely his war is developing.

2) Admittedly this second item is technically not a toy in that most of its users are probably over 35, but how could one not include the new videogame JFK Reloaded. The timing of this launch is perfect, since most will agree that sniping is currently “in” (or at least seems to be in my circles). But in reality this toy is long overdue; when I made my first pilgrimage to Dealey Plaza in 1996, I recall looking upward and admiring the superb sight lines, but to finally get a chance to actually test them out…thank you open source 3D graphics! No doubt many will tediously protest that JFK Reloaded is declinist because it simulates and sensationalizes a national tragedy, that it turns murder into entertainment. These pacifists should promptly be dismissed. I mean even the Warren Commission took pleasure in recreating the scene of the crime in loving and meticulous detail, and as early as 1975 the vogue of recreating the Kennedy assassination had acquired the sheen of high art. So let us not take the high road here and pretend like we ourselves prefer not to pop off a shot or two at the ol’ motorcade, even if it is with a dash of Warholian irony. No, the real declinist element of this game is not when the game is actually played, but when it is not played. Like all games today, JFK Reloaded has an autoplay feature, where you can literally have the hi-resolution simulation of JFK’s last minutes roll before you in graphic detail, over and over and over again, from different angles, on your 52” plasma flat-screen TV, day in and day out, while you go about your daily affairs, talk on the phone, cook dinner, and play canasta. This will indeed have untold, far-reaching effects, too early to tell what they may be. Far worse is the bleak consequence that the game eliminates all mystery from the assassination with the unnerving stroke of digital precision. Consequently, it saps one of America’s most bright and promising young communities of their generative curiosity--the JFK conspiracy theorists. What we might have imagined as a boon for conspiracy theorists will actually lead them into despondence and denial, for what is left for them to do once a machine can effortlessly calculate what they have been striving for their whole lives. No more need to meticulously create hand-painted models of Dealey Plaza, no more desire to trace "magic" bullet trajectories on graph paper, no more pleasure in running your bare feet in the soft, earthen sod of the grassy knoll: all these effects and more can now be piped directly to your 52” plasma screen with the click of the button. The creative spark of these fine enthusiasts has been extinguished. Into the closet will go their bolt-action hunting rifles, dust will collect on medical evidence from the Parkland Emergency Room, even the names Guy Bannister and Abraham Zapruder will lose all meaning, Alvy Singer will finally make love to Allison Portchnik, and we all collectively slip one more notch toward decline.

One question remains, will Bush get a copy of JFK Reloaded for Christmas from his newly appointed Secretary of State? (Condi reportedly gave George a Game Boy year before last…Ahh love.)

Declinism and the New Pessimism: A Manifesto

We are a nation in decline. Although there is no single way of explaining this phenomenon, no one theory or cause at its origin, the unavoidable fact remains nonetheless: the West is gradually slipping into oblivion and withering away. How we see this process, its causes and effects, is as diverse as the many facets of our culture itself, but we cannot deny that the fabric of the western world is rapidly unraveling and the self-evident truth that our collective narrative has reached its third act is incontrovertible.

This blog, unlike other pronouncements of decline, will not seek to theorize our unmistakable demise with a single brushstroke or an overarching theory, but instead will be devoted to collecting the micro-details of this process by revealing how the rhetoric of decline has become intertwined with our everyday experience and inscribed in our artifacts. Our project is to bear witness to the dawning of the epoch of decline, which has begun to quietly unfold and gradually erode our way of life. So we will not attempt to theorize, along with those great classics of the end (Petrarch, Marx, Nietzsche, Spengler, Buchannon, Hitchens), a blanket explanation of this process or the unifying spirit of the times, but simply note individual instances of decline as they arise and influence our daily lives. It is our hope that through a project of intense cultural scrutiny we can achieve a better understanding of the dynamics of decline, which will ultimately help us fully appreciate the process as it unfolds. Like the intersecting spokes of a wheel, we will constantly interpret the convergence of culture, history, politics, technology, fashion, religion, art, and science with an eye to toward revealing the declinist center around which they all turn. We are here engaged in a project of anticipatory archeology--preparing, collecting, and arranging artifacts for future discovery--which will be, for the post-declinist masses, invaluable indices of deterioration and retrogradation, clear evidence of our own historical moment after the work of decline has come to a close. Furthermore, we are committed to reversing the pattern of deep denial or “bulkheads” (more on this later) held by so many of our family, friends, and community members. We seek to replace that denial by embracing entropy and building a community of pessimism, a new pessimism open to the naked truth of our moribund and degenerate lifestyle and culture. That is to say, finally, that ours is a project of ethics. We are here to dutifully uphold and deliver the fundamental principle upon which this blog is based:

Pessimism is the last authentic virtue left in the world.