No, I don’t mean Oswald, but the coward who hides behind his name, writing for Asia Times Online:

With the coincident debut of the gay cowboy film Brokeback Mountain (Homo on the Range, [1] as the San Francisco newspapers wrote) and the conspiratorial fantasy Syriana, it has been a banner week for gays and the Palestinians, at least in the American cinema. Syriana depicts a conspiracy by the Central Intelligence Agency and oil companies to subvert an Arab kingdom, while Bareback Mountain [sic] attempts to “queer” the traditional American cowboy film.

While these exercises in cutting-edge culture struggle at the box office, a film version of C S Lewis’ Christian allegory The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had a $70 million opening weekend.

The mention of the C.S. Lewis “allegory” is interesting, considering the fact that “Spengler” mentioned in the paragraph immediately preceding these the following:

Liberal Hollywood is the heart of America’s Democratic Party, and its offerings for the Christmas season explain why the opposition to the present administration remains weaker even than the flailing White House.

My, my. How did that dastardly Satan, LIBERAL HOLLYWOOD, let Lewis’ book slip into movie form?

“Spengler” continues his diatribe against gays and LIBERAL HOLLYWOOD after a purposeful slip-of-the-tongue commonly witnessed in homophobic speech —

I have nothing against homosexuals, although I think homosexuality a poor theme for political agitation.

— [which means that homosexuality is 100% acceptable as long as gays just shut up and stay hidden safely from view] by conflating the gay romantic drama of Brokeback Mountain with Spielberg’s forthcoming film about the terrorist attack on Jewish Olympians at the Munich Olympics, Munich. How are the dots connected by “Spengler”? Why, the screenwriter chosen by Spielberg happens to be gay: Tony Kushner, of Angels in America fame. So now it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?

Nazis, of course, know how to intermingle truth in their weaving of lies, the better to sell their lies; and although “Spengler” appears to have forgotten Oswald’s rejection of the worst Nazist lies, he nonetheless remembers their method for creating propaganda. First, frame an argument by appealing to abstract purities — in this queer case: Marxism is bad; the Soviet Union was entirely evil; “revealed truth” is the holiest of holies — and then show how your opponent is purely evil because he entirely rejects these abstract purities:

Kushner is not only gay, but also a Marxist. Of Jewish extraction, he despises Zionism.

Kushner identified with the Soviet Union until its collapse. Afterward he told an interviewer, “The collapse of the Soviet system does not mean that capitalism has succeeded … Socialism is simply the idea that people are better off if we work collectively and that the economic system we live in is made by people and therefore can be controlled intelligently rather than let loose. There’s no way that can’t be true.”

“Spengler” does not bother weighing Kushner’s words because 1) he has already labeled Kushner an evil Marxist supporter of the Soviet Union and 2) he depends on our faith in “pure capitalism” to carry the argument against Kushner. But then, it is no surprise that “Spengler” does not try overly hard to make a logical argument, since his theory of “revealed truth” supplies all his argument:

If one disdains revealed truth as a relic of the barbaric past, one finds truth only in the “authentic” self-expression of every grouplet in the world. Gays become authentic by actualizing their own truth, along with African-Americans, Native Americans, Palestinians, or whatever band of sufferers might turn up with a grievance.

Very quickly, “Spengler’s” absolutist purism becomes apparent, even while the exact dimensions of that purism are left abstract or hidden behind rhetoric such as “I have nothing against homosexuals…” Too bad that “Spengler” also depends on the purity of Multiculturalism is evil!, because he might have been able to make an argument against runaway relativism. He has used quotation marks around the word “authentic” (above) in order to categorically reject everything that those groups might say: even if a gay man or an African-American or a Palestinian utters one truth, that truth is invalid because truth really comes from above, or is “revealed.” “Spengler” could have cautioned against an absolutist relativism — or the belief that whatever a member of a minority might say is automatically true — but his own absolute purism does not allow him to do so:

Futility makes poor theater. If Spielberg had portrayed a moral equivalence between the great white shark and its hunters, Jaws would have bombed at the box office. American audiences sat on the edge of their seats waiting for Roy Scheider to wreak vengeance against the toothsome monster. Indiana Jones’ enemies meet hideous deaths, to audience cheers. The director who made his reputation pandering to vengeful bloodlust now wants moviegoers to ponder the moral equivalences in war. Vengeance makes for good box office, as Aeschylus well knew. Moral ambiguity just wins the Pulitzer Prize (or in the case of Harold Pinter, the Nobel)

This is an argument I can imagine being delivered by acquaintances in the Blogosphere. Moral ambiguity did not sell Lord of the Rings — on the contrary, the same sort of absolutist good vs evil morality supported by “Spengler” helped to sell those books and movies — and everywhere one visits in the Blogosphere, some pundit is delivering a similar choice, some absolute truth to be digested. Considering the phenomenal successes of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Star Wars trilogies, and even Jaws, one wonders why “Spengler” believes that his precious capitalism is rejected by Hollywood, the most capitalist industry in America. Hollywood capitalizes on our thought, our culture, our whims, and expects a nice return on their investments. (Even if, of course, some producers and directors are not very agile in the capitalist system, like many other entrepreneurs throughout American society.) Perhaps “Spengler” rejects America itself:

Well may Americans disapprove of the president’s poor handling of Iraq, but they are quite happy to slaughter their enemies when opportunity permits. Nor do they sit up nights worrying, like Kushner’s fictional Mossad agents, about whether they might kill the wrong fellow on occasion.

If nothing else in the Asia Times screed points at the confusion in “Spengler’s” argument, this should. He has not only mauled the moral ambiguity of LIBERAL HOLLYWOOD — composed mostly of Americans, and producer of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe — but he is also trying to say that America is an entirely homogenous culture in which the members “are quite happy to slaughter their enemies when opportunity permits.” “Spengler’s” absolute purism leads him to slaughter his enemies without “worrying…about whether [he] might kill the wrong fellow on occasion” simply because the easiest path is to paint his enemy in absolutist terms and worry about sorting out particulars later.

But I would be remiss if I followed “Spengler’s” method of argument in creating my own. Moral equivalency occurs because no clear moral path presents itself equally to every person. The screed at Asia Times attempts to clarify a path without actually clarifying anything; and, it ought to be considered an example of the root of moral equivalency. “Spengler” has not painted a clear enemy, but makes broad strokes while entirely ignoring the particular shape of his allies (if any exist.) There is no good and evil in his screed, but so many shades of gray. As with many absolutist purists, he does not comprehend anything but other (opposing) absolutist purists: and those are essentially what he has created in his mind and attempted to paint for us. This is the shape of the shifting Paradigm:

When so many purisms engage in combat, some parts of each are slaughtered; weakened, they are more likely to intermingle, particularly when other purists seek a purity capable of including what remains of previous purities; and the Old Guard witnesses all of this and believes it is the birth of “relativism” or “multiculturalism” or “moral ambiguity.” One hopes that the truth of each purism is what will survive in combat, and that the resulting absolute of the mingling of these truths will take hold in the global consciousness; but the limitations of the Old Guard remain to prevent such amelioration.

But the Old Guard are hopelessly outnumbered, dying day by day.