It is almost Midnight in Richmond, Virginia. I have YouTube on. There is a performance of Les Indes Galante 1, by Jean Phillippe Rameau. If you like baroque opera/ballet combined with total nudity, this performance is for you. This is a French production. We have lean and lithe dancers’ bodies, uh, dancing about.  

It’s OK, I suppose. The music is more engaging than the nekkid people. This choreography is just down right silly.

What does this have to with too much coffee? I ran out of decaf, you see. And I slept entirely too much today. So I am awake. I’m thinking I should read, but no. Now in the “performance” there is a procession of clothed people, led by a man dressed as the Pope. I know this is supposed to symbolize something but quite frankly, I don’t care.  The innocent nekkid people, corrupted by (boo, hiss) CIVILIZATION, perhaps?   Next we have  rube tourists wanting to get to this Eden where the naked people cavort. I know the 18th Century gave this idea of the Noble Savage., Merci, Monsieur Rousseau. Maybe this stupid ballet is what we need to bury the Noble Savage idea once and for all eternity.

About twenty years ago, I saw a classic French film, Les Enfants du Paradise, for the first time. It was an homage to classical French Theatre. How tragic that the French no longer take their art seriously.  Western Culture is engaged in an orgy of self-hatred, as evidenced by this performance.

Maybe, we in the West will summon the collective courage, intellect and will to challenge the intellectual foundation of modernism, specifically the works of Freud, Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin.  Intellectual counterrevolutions take time.  

Rant over.