First the Grotesque, parallels with 1930s Germany. A commentary on modern exhibitionists by Bill Whittle.

We have it backwards when we lament what Miley Cyrus is doing to our culture. The question we should be asking is “What is our culture doing to Miley Cyrus?” What’s in the air, the zeitgeist, that turns someone from Hannah Montana into a kind of pathetically desperate, absurdly sexualized, insatiable attention junkie?

Well, we know. It is, as in the case of 1930s Germany, a culture whose elites, unlike the solids of the sensible middle, are bored, jaded, and above all filled with the self-loathing and self-hatred that can be described as nothing less than a death wish.

Germany used to be regarded as the world’s foremost nation in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a technological powerhouse and the most progressive nation of its time. But by the 1920s it was definitely on the way down, relatively speaking.