WHAT, ME WEIMAR? Rod Dreher picks up the W-word in response to what sounds like a fairly ordinary "transgressive" novel:

For some reason, this reminds me of an exhibition of Weimar-era paintings and drawings that I visited a few years ago at a New York museum with a friend. When we'd gone through the last gallery, she turned to me and said, "You can hear the trains to Auschwitz coming, can't you?" Yes, you could. I don't know what we can hear coming in "Wetlands" and its popularity, but from what I can tell by the press account, it's nothing good.

This sort of displacement is common among a certain kind of culture scold. Let's go back to 1995 and attend the words of Michael D. Weiss of the hyperlibertarian The Freeman, as he patroled the streets of neo-Weimar New York:

Women sport black hair and nose rings, wear men's "Doc Marten's" shoes or cowboy boots, ripped jeans, and t-shirts sporting bizarre, horrifying, or obscene logos. According to Lola, a pink-haired, nose-ringed student at New York's Parsons School of Art, "Postmodernism is the rage in art schools. Everybody dresses in black. It's fashion"...

The war on civilization has certainly begun on the streets of New York. On Broadway, near Broome Street, vendors sell disembodied mannequin parts for $5 apiece (3 for $12)...

St. Mark's Books at 9th and 3rd advances the war on civilization. The store is full of urban primitives (the vanguard of the terror culture movement), all in black, perusing magazine racks of obscure, photocopied magazines on anarchism, obscenity, terror, and, of course, every conceivable brand of rock and roll...

Another front of terror culture's "war on everything" involves body mutilations—disfiguring, scarring, and piercing...

Much of the experience of modern-day New York echoes another metropolis, another time...

Cue "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" and flash forward to the inevitable fruits of decadence: the Resistible Rise of Michael Bloomberg. Wachet Auf!

In the present day, Dreher expresses concern that some unnamed party will step forward to sweep away the Entartete Kunst that bothers him so. I used to think this sort of talk reflected wishful thinking. Now I just think they should refrain from watching Cabaret when they're really stoned.