Look, we get political now. All this theory—it is just compassion. Theory (Jameson’s kind) is just compassion—agreeing. You see the pain, feel the pain, of the new category—oppressed minority, or other-gender, or race, or other sexuality. Then you just pull a Rawls: Unless you’re fucking insane, you lift the bottom as high as possible. Period. The end. Why? Well, for the very well-attested bourgeois reason of rational self-interest. It is you who could be the lesbian daughter of a crack whore welfare queen. When that queen is happy, baby becomes: intelligent, compassionate, team-player, worker, pro-social, social contributor, friendly, and increasing the quality of life around her. The suffering baby become aggressive, has poor grammar, believes his gang upbringing is noble, and does not want to see that his persona is a painful bullshit social construction. He is, like the Puritan German redneck, an anti-intellectual.

Rednecks and gangsters agree: smart people are the enemy. The Nazi god and the Great Elijah Muhammad both agree that God loves obedience and that evolution makes God mad. That’s the first step: believe and do not question.

But the really sexy gift is not just negative, but also positive. Not only do you not bother understanding how a cell works

The next step is the point of this POST. It is something perverse. It is a gesture of self-debasement. Of these, there are two types:

1. Intentionally not understanding. Preserving the black box nature of things. Lowering intelligence as a tribute or sacrifice for God. With Evangelicals, this is very strong. Learning biology is offensive, because it is doubting a God who will make you rich if you scoff at science, which God interprets as cheering and glorifying.
2. Intentionally believing what is false. When you deny the evidence of experience, measurement, laws that are repeatedly followed, reproducibility and replicability, peer review—al this—and uphold something opposite, that is like analingus. It gives God extreme pleasure.

So today no American will make witty unsettling horror movies, and especially not in lovely anthologies.