A man named Esther Pasztory wrote: "'Nostalgie de la boue' means ascribing higher spiritual values to people and cultures considered 'lower' than oneself, the romanticization of the faraway primitive which is also the equivalent of the lower class close to home. "
“Nostalgie de la boue” is a concept which I have regarded as the delusional hallmark and centerpiece of liberalism in America for many years as well as part of the pure essence of the plague in America known as "political correctness"; in effect, many middle class Americans have taken up the cause of anti-colonialism, wittingly and unwittingly, not least among them President Barak Obama.
As a photographer, I don’t know how many times I have seen photos of native Americans in the US or Nicaragua, etc., where the caption speaks to the nobility and spirituality inherent in their facial features; no one would write such a caption beneath the photo of an Ohio truck driver. And yet they are one and the same thing except of course when it comes to our own culture and then suddenly and mysteriously cultural relativsm need not apply. This is just a more subtle and nuanced form of racism that liberals are unwittingly in love with - the idea that a man in a turban knows the "real deal" compared to a man in a baseball cap. It is why the liberal Left in America love the concept of multiculturalism which is a bankrupt idea in reality but which the Left in America adore as inarguable and self-evident. Liberals assign the same “Nostalgie de la boue” to black Americans as well which black American "intellectuals" eat up with a spoon, little realizing or caring about the double-edged nature of racism and how the concept of “Nostalgie de la boue” can work against them.
The idea that people in India or Asia are more spiritual or less debauched than an endemically shallow consumerist, racist and imperialist American is laughable but taken as faith by liberals because it is what they have been taught and what they want to see. One need only look at the amount of garbage thrown into the Ganges at the holy Hindu city of Varanasi where I spent 2 weeks one winter as an example of how stupid the idea is; space does not allow me to cite many more in my 5 years in Third World countries.
As an example, to liberals, Haitians are noble and held back only by a generational hangover as a result of white racism and colonialism. In this view, it is little noted how the Jews came out of concentration camps with 1,000 years of on again, off again, murder and bigotry arrayed against them but created Israel in 3 years nor is it noted that there has been no white presence in Haiti for some 2 centuries. Where was this generational hangover for the Jews and why is this phenomena taken as fact to describe the continual lack of achievement in black and Latino communities across America, or the world for that matter?
“Nostalgie de la boue” and the photographic example I have used is a nearly perfect example of Orwellian "doublethink" in that it shows how Left leaning world views can literally overwhelm one’s ability to reason fairly and see what is right in front of their eyes and enable a person to see what they want to see and ignore what does not fit into their world view. It’s why the Left loves immigration, illegal and otherwise aside from the attempt to gerrymander the votes of those illegal foreign nationals, itself an utterly degraded and dangerous act.
Political Correctness has evolved from the hippie movement of the 60s into a terrible, terrible blight on America and its ability to move forward into a future not overwhelmed by excuse after excuse for lack of achievement, as if Mexicans and Somalians only need to be given a fighting chance to add innovations to string theory and black Americans given just a few hundred more years to shake off the effects of slavery and Jim Crow; in this new paradigm, Third World countries don't put men on the moon for lack of competence, willpower or lack of resources but because of white racism and the after effects of white imperialism - common sense has been trumped by white middle class guilt and its attendant myopic cultural chauvinism.
The Left would have you believe that what I have written is just code to hide my own racism, unwitting or otherwise but I see it as common sense and observation. If half of America were left to black Americans and the other to a Latino dreamworld of Aztlan, you would have a giant version of Haiti next to a slow return to the “Copper Age” and a culture that didn’t even have the wheel; Haiti suffers from the problems it has because of the people who comprise its make up and not because of those who do not and this equation is yet another central example of white liberalism - those who are not present in any real sense are guilty and those who are present, innocents - the spectre of white racism rears its head over every black ghetto in the United States, ghettos which have no white people to in fact influence events. In regard to this, the American Left has now taken up the cultural imperialism of the "white man’s burden" in a manner that is patronizing and makes it the job of a forklift driver in Kansas or a barber in Florida to allow his own culture to be overwhelmed by Third World immigrants; proponents of multiculturalism will not be happy or consider America "perfect" until its demographic make up reflects the entire world, a United Nations of America.
Add into this mix the liberal notion of multiculturalism and cultural relativism and you have a problem relating to reality itself which will not bend to ones will just because it doesn't jibe with one's political beliefs. In cultural relativism, if one culture is not as good as another than it must be the other guy's fault rather than an endemic lack of that culture's values in the first place. This is why liberals for the life of them cannot figure out why Haiti is the way it is and who exactly to blame since in a liberal scenario the only people one cannot blame is the Haitians themselves. The bewildering flip side to cultural relativism in the case of America is that every country's cultures are equal except our own which is a tale of sin, depravity and exploitation while the rest of the world, particularly the Third World, are devoid of such problems in a similarly bewildering and patronizing display of racism where the darker your skin the higher your value system not to mention morality.
If a culture can do a thing, it will have done it and you can’t keep a good man down. European Americans have constantly innovated and invented with no blueprint in front of them but in Latin America, even with technologies and the US Constitution written on paper, they cannot emulate them. Liberal views of Third World countries are their own form of racist code as the Left treats anyone who is not white as spiritual and oppressed and whites themselves as endemic racists and so assigning characteristics by skin color which is okay as long as the finger is pointed at whites. The true difference between these cultures and peoples are values and not skin color but a liberal can look at a photo and tell you differently.