The End Nears . . .

“The end nears when fools are hailed and the sages ignored —.”

This bit of ancient wisdom came to our minds when we were going through Time magazine’s cover story on one Shirley MacLaine, a successful actress and a quasicultural emblem of the liberal America. The gist of Time‘s text is, as usual, an extravagantly weird celebration of a quite vicious case of insipidity — and Time‘s seasoned editors know well that extolling fools in its pages makes them both thrive even more. Why do the editors do this? It is difficult to explain other than by citing their rampant cultural insouciance and irresponsibility.

The seven-page feature contains not one clear sentence about Ms. MacLaine’s overt procommunist sympathies; instead, Time, with its liberal-journalistic perfidy, calls Ms. MacLaine a “political activist” and eagerly notes that she’s worth S15 million. Indeed, it’s not only easy but downright fun to be radical in today’s America with such an amount of cash at hand.

Ms. MacLaine, in addition to various and sundry other pastimes and occupations, writes books. According to Time, one of them, Out on a Limb, was a bestseller: “I 76,000 in hard-cover and about 1.2 million in paperback.” The book contains priceless nuggets of knowledge like this one: “Jesus Christ developed mystical powers during years of study among holy men in India” Such a revelation should not be too surprising, given the author, whose intellectual self­ description is as follows: “Philosophically, celebrating myself is what I am into.” Time, it seems, is into the subject of its cover story. It would be unfair, though, to blame Time for single-handedly creating an American darling out of a dunce: its liberal brethren in foisting idiocy upon America provide the main impetus to the cultural vector of our time that insists that common sense be silenced in the face of celebrity. This is how clowns become sages and the end nears.  cc