This past Saturday, Trump-era provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos resurfaced on-stream with internet bloodsports veteran and inner circle groyper Beardson Beardly. The occasion was a debate on the spiritual ramifications of grown men pursuing children’s hobbies–in this case, Pokémon cards.
If you’re wondering how the dispute started, one of the Groypers’ wignat critics posted a screen shot of Beardson fawning over a rare Charizard he’d acquired. Milo reposted it with a lament at Western men’s obsession with childish diversions. The gauntlet was thrown down.
Beardson had been predicting an easy win all month, but when Milo got around to showing up, he brought a reminder of why the Death Cult targeted him as cancellation patient zero. Say what you want about his personal vices, he possesses a depth and breadth of knowledge sorely lacking in the new crop of dissidents.
So instead of the expected finger-wagging lecture about how grownups aren’t allowed to have fun, Milo blindsided Beardson with an appeal to Christian teachings on the role and nature of art. He correctly pointed out that art consists of works that aim to represent truth and beauty for the purpose of lifting up the soul to God, who is Truth and the source of all beauty.
As we have documented copiously on this blog, Current Year corporate product is churned out for the exact opposite motive. When beloved cartoon characters are retconned as sexual deviants and American comic book icons are replaced with foreign weirdos, the goal isn’t wholesome fun but audience humiliation.
Milo only made one misstep–or rather, he came up one step short of the full picture. He asserted that corporate games, films, and comics are addictions. He isn’t wrong, but what he’s missing is that for many the addiction isn’t to the flashy video images and cardboard crack itself–it’s to the dopamine hit that comes from membership in a cult.
Now, Beardson convincingly argued the point that Pokémon is among the more benign corporate IPs. St. John Paul II even approved it. Where Beardly fumbled, revealing his hand, was in denying Milo’s assertion, in line with consistent Christian teaching, that art is objective. Someone who thinks beauty is subjective should contemplate his standing in the Church, let alone the new counterculture movement.
In highlighting Millennials’ aesthetic impoverishment, Milo came close to explicating Cultural Ground Zero and Revised Generation theory. Milo, a member of Gen Y, still sees the value in Shakespeare, Mozart, and Rembrandt. He has no qualms about recognizing classical art’s objective superiority to contemporary corporate product. Beardson wasted no time manifesting the definitive Millennial contempt for and dismissal of the past.
When someone claims that cape shit movies are better art than Wagner, you can only echo Milo’s lament that Millennials have been robbed, and they don’t even know what they’ve lost.
Watch the debate and learn (Skip to the 55 minute mark for Milo’s appearance).
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