The provocative quote in the headline is a paraphrase of something Louis Ferdinand Celine said in a Paris Review interview...”Good Riddance to Western Civilization is my response.”I was reminded of what Celine said when the Steve King story took off. His disingenuous quote annoyed me..”White Nationalist, White Supremacist, Western Civilization...how did that language become offensive?”
Well Steve, that language became offensive when you used inoffensive sounding terms like western civilization to say,“Poor Me, the Culture Warriors don’t like white men”. For you, Western Civilization is not the culture that sprang in the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia, that grew in the Eastern Mediterranean, nurtured by Greece, Spread by Rome..etc..it’s the imaginary world of Ozzie and Harriet and a yearning for a time when “the others” knew their place.
If the culmination of Western Civilization is a genocidal war driven by fascists, the hell with it. If it’s a fig leaf for a racist congressman, likewise.If it’s the spirit of the enlightenment, what’s not to like?