The suicide rate among people ages 10 to 24 years old climbed 56% between 2007 and 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported https://t.co/f5lUJ8076r pic.twitter.com/CkcHekPQrB — The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) October 17, 2019

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;

Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;

Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,

Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

Grim-visaged war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front;

And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds

To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,

He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber

To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

— William Shakespeare, Richard III (1.1.1-13)

It is no fantastic revelation that the people of our nation, and, indeed, our entire civilization are in a state of moral, spiritual, and physical collapse.

Our communities are plagued with drug and other substance addiction.

For the first time in one hundred years, our life expectancy is actually decreasing.

Our families have been completely decimated by divorce, single parenthood and infidelity.

We are getting poorer and dumber and are being overwhelmed by an enormous wave of third world migrants who have been imported here by our enemies for the very purpose of replacing us completely.

To top it all off, we are inundated with media that is programmed to humiliate and degrade us and ultimately finish off whatever psychological and spiritual resistance we might have to the Globohomo imperium.

For those among Generation Z and the millennial generation, this miserable hellscape is all that they have every known.

Ironically, for the Baby Boomers and the members of the Silent Generation —especially those who are wealthy enough to buy themselves safe spaces in gated communities and time shares—the bankrupt and demoralized diversity hell-world of post-millennial America is but a temporary unpleasantness that they have to deal with on occasion when they fill up for gas in the wrong side of town or bump into ANTIFA after a Trump rally.

There is, however, the strange two generations between the Boomer and the Millennials.

The Gen Xers and the lesser known Generation Y have known both the prosperous confident and ethnically homogenous post-World War II United States as well as the desperate, unhappy and fractious post- 9/11 America.

In their youth, these generations knew they could count on the police and the wider American judicial system to be fair and impartial.

While there were already diversity quotas and affirmative action slots in college admissions and in employment, every American kid believed that if he worked hard enough, he could make it into Notre Dame or Harvard and could land the job of his dreams.

The key transitional decade for these two generations is the 1990s when the Gen Xers went to college, and the members of Generation Y went through high school.

Just as the culture of Trump Era acts as funhouse mirror for our own Clown World experience, so too did the 1990s mass media serve as a sort of bon voyage or Indian Summer of our nation.

The 90s, rightly or wrongly, are often perceived as a riff or afterglow of the 1980s, a decade that leftists and radical liberals frequently bemoan as a stuffy and unhappy repetition of the Eisenhower era.

Thus, campy and allegedly wholesome television series replete with heart tugging moral lessons about drug experimentation and first dates such as Full House, Home Improvement, and Growing Pains presented variant forms of the nuclear family or at least, as in the case of Full House, presented the nuclear family as a norm that had in some way tragically broken. These sitcoms and a host of others, even those that were raunchy or down right degenerate such as Roseanne, The Simpsons, or Married…with Children still operated within the bounds a loosely defined Christian moral framework even or when they transgressed or subversively mocked it. Moreover, they provided white or at least white-presenting families who lived in largely ethnically homogenous towns in which the school, judicial, and wider political system functioned according to the rule of justice—and when it didn’t, it was funny.

At the same time, these shows were joined by a host of funky, hip, but ultimately white-presenting sitcoms such as Moesha, Hangin’ with Mister Cooper, as well as the Cosby Show and it’s hipper and blacker (but not too black) Cosby Show Spin Off, A Different World. The premise of these black sitcoms, which were largely targeting an increasingly confused and deracinated white American audience, was that Historic Black Americans were just as Americans as white folks—except they lived cooler and more flavorful lives. The moral lessons of these shows largely revolved around black Americans struggling simultaneously with middle class white issues (the temptations of drugs, the “first kiss,” etc.) while, at the same time, striving to overcome persistent white racism, which, the shows’ writers assured us, was always on the edge of being overcome—if only white folks would soften their hearts.

The key message behind the black sitcoms to both white and black America was that there was a small black minority in America that, while retaining its own unique culture, was just as American as the regular white Americans, and it was only a matter of time before the walls of injustice would come tumbling down and blacks and whites would live in harmony.

Beneath these laugh track accompanied projects of bourgeois American life, however, there was a darker current and anger and frustration.

The music of the 1990s is often known for its coarseness, violence and aggression. From grunge bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains, to gangsta rap and hardcore hiphop acts like N.W.A. and The Notorious B.I.G., to radically politicized groups like Pearl Jam and Rage against the Machine, the most skilled of the 90s artists were fundamentally about challenging what remained of the white Christian middle class American status quo. However, like the vulgar sitcoms, movies, and stand up acts of the 90s, the aggressive music of the era relied precisely on the status quo as a monolith against which they could rail. Marilyn Manson’s on stage desecrations of the Bible and mockery of Christian images in his videos only was shocking because Americans still revered the Bible and venerated the Virgin Mary.

As many film critics have noted, the 1990s was the last decade in which the aftershocks of the great works of New Hollywood were felt as well as the last decade in which consistently good films—both “art house” and blockbuster cinema. The annus mirabilis for 90s films was, of course, 1999, the cusp of the millennium in which America, reluctantly said good bye to the 20thcentury and was pushed into the new millennium.

Films such as The Matrix, Fight Club, Magnolia, and American Beauty provided a bon voyage to the hyper capitalist and unsettlingly tranquilized post-World War II era in which Americans got to buy everything they ever wanted but traded their happiness and ultimately their country in the process.

Those pushing forward the “culture of critique” got exactly what they wanted in the 21st century: Western civilization is in a process of free fall disintegration.

However, as we pick up the pieces and reforge a new civilization and a new life for our people from these ashes and ruins, we must reflect that the world of the 20th century with its comforts and complacency is what got us to this point, and, ironically, those artists who were most critical and subversive of late 20th century American life may have been on to something after all.