Despite a love of books I endured English as a subject only as far as I had to take it in high school, which was up to the end of 6th Form (Year 12 it is now called). Funnily enough that last year was the one I enjoyed the most as various books and essays had to be analysed.

Earlier English courses were broader, covering things like art and poetry.

I hated poetry.

Despite hating it (or perhaps because of that) there were certain types of poetry and art that stuck in the mind although the details are long lost. One of them was “Concrete Poetry”. The other was Dadaism:

… the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works. The art of the movement spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture.

Ah yes. The boy who loved science, logic, reason, and rationality was really going to fall for this stuff. It was crap. Our entire class thought it was crap, including those who would go on to do university degrees in English. Luckily we had an English teacher (huge, ginger afro and beard) who was more than happy to hear such blunt critiques and be amused by them.

So it has been with a sense of amusement and despair that I have watched a video going viral around the Interwebby that shows Afghan women being taught about Dadaism in 2015. The key view is at 31 seconds:

Incredible is it not? American taxpayers paid for this, as well as many, many other such things, as Cockburn explains at the Spectator:

So, alongside the billions for bombs went hundreds of millions for gender studies in Afghanistan. According to US government reports, $787 million was spent on gender programs in Afghanistan, but that substantially understates the actual total, since gender goals were folded into practically every undertaking America made in the country.

A recent report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) broke down the difficulties of the project. For starters, in both Dari and Pastho there are no words for ‘gender’. That makes sense, since the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ was only invented by a sexually-abusive child psychiatrist in the 1960s, but evidently Americans were caught off-guard.
…
The initiatives piled up one after another. Do-gooders established a ‘National Masculinity Alliance’, so a few hundred Afghan men could talk about their ‘gender roles’ and ‘examine male attitudes that are harmful to women’.

Challenging. In every sense of the word.

Under the US’s guidance, Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution set a 27 percent quota for women in the lower house — higher than the actual figure in America! A strategy that sometimes required having women represent provinces they had never actually been to. Remarkably, this experiment in ‘democracy’ created a government few were willing to fight for, let alone die for.

Probably the exact opposite, as Never Yet Melted suggests:

Western elites let Afghans see what Western elite culture is like. Naturally, and inevitably, they took down their AK-47s from the wall and fought tooth and nail to prevent being assimilated into that!

It should also be noted that Dadaism arose in Germany after WWI in reaction to the waste, horror and futility of that war and was driven by the radical Left, who used it to attack everything they hated about the West. It was one of the centre pieces of the early German Weimar period of government and fit perfectly with the uselessness and decadence of Weimar culture.

Perhaps that means we’ll see Dadism soon reborn in the USA, using MRE’s, PortaPotties, MRAPS and HumVees as the objects of art. The whole ethos would be a perfect fit for the American now. I’m also reminded of the famous final scene from the movie Cabaret.

As Law Professor Glenn Reynolds noted on his Instapundit blog:

“The American political/academic/managerial class is made up largely of buffoons. It’s hilarious, except for it being so toxic and deadly.”