Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
— Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

In the 21^st century, the Marxist Left accomplished something foreign enemies and the Confederacy had only dreamt about — rotted the United States to the core. Apart from the short stretch of unity that followed 9/11 — gradually squandered by a long pointless war — and the out-of-the-blue productive Trump administration — felled by COVID-19 — America declined at warp speed. But one cannot solely blame the leftists. Conservatives deserve as much opprobrium, if not more.

Progressives had pursued the national destruction for longer than I’ve been alive — and I came here from a country that not only let itself be poisoned, but embraced the poisoner, Fidel Castro. American traditionalists have done the former, if not yet the latter. Until recently, they did go gentle into that good night, allowing their culture to fester and their government to tyrannize. For politics, as Andrew Breitbart famously said, is downstream from culture. And the generation charged with preserving the culture instead ceded it to barbarians.

The cultural Visigoths fabricated division where there was none, turning blacks against whites, women against men, homosexuals against heterosexuals, and fake women against real women. They converted the most incredible communication technology into a mind-numbing, censorious, pornographic swamp. And what have they wrought? One new poll says Americans now think blacks are more racist than whites. Another poll finds a staggering 60 percent of young males have no social, romantic, or sexual attachments, which is historically unprecedented.

The most conservatives did this century was pooh-pooh leftists even as they gave ground to them. It reminds me of a hysterical sketch, Frog and Peach, by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

COOK: World War II. Do you remember that? Absolutely ghastly business. I was completely against it.

MOORE: I think we all were.

COOK: Yeah, but I wrote a letter.

The supposed gatekeepers paid a small fortune to send their children to the heart of darkness — academia. Where mad teachers mutated them into incoherent lemmings — historically ignorant, obsessed with skin color to the ludicrous point of white guilt, and anti-male yet uncertain of their own gender. The guardians stood by while art devolved into grotesquery and screen entertainment into ordeal, produced by talentless yet inclusively-correct hacks.

And the true artists went into exile, too many as flagellants lamenting their original sin of interpreting reality. Once upon a time, their work would have endured forever, well beyond the garbage of their usurpers. But as I stated in my last column, no masterpiece today is safe from these cannibalistic ghouls, whether it be by Roald Dahl or Ian Fleming.

James Bond may have defeated Dr. No, Goldfinger, and SPECTRE, but he was no match for octo-wokeness. According to the Telegraph, Ian Fleming Publications Ltd. commissioned sensitivity readers — similar to those that butchered Dahl’s books — to racially and sexually purify the Bond books. For example, a passage from the second 007 novel, Live and Let Die (1954), which describes men reacting to a particularly salacious stripper, “Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough,” now reads, “Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.” Not only is this an atrocity against literature by sissies who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near an Ian Fleming book, it is putrid writing which posthumously castrates the author, his obviously no longer immortal creation, and men in general.

“Electric tension in the room” could just as well refer to a baccarat game and have nothing to do with male sexual desire. What Fleming sensually and perhaps painstakingly described has been neutered into sexless unclarity by people who believe men can be women. And the punks who inherited a hero they could never have created gave them that power.

Fleming deliberately created James Bond as the antithesis of the foppish, asexual British detectives of his day. He preferred the sexist yet rich machismo of American heroes Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and Mike Hammer, and sought to infuse it into a patriotic English hero. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams and gave pleasure to millions. Now his legal heirs are desperate to take it away and mutate the womanizing spy into an unrecognizable simp. It’s one thing for the daughter of producer Albert Broccoli, who helped make Bond a universal male sex symbol, to mutate him into a metrosexual mope and ultimately kill him off. It’s another to dig him up to do the same thing.

But maybe conservatives have finally learned their lesson — that you can’t leave greatness to jackals. Their recent backlash against Puffin Books, the publisher of Roald Dahl’s classics, persuaded the company to release the works in their original form. James Bond has even tougher and, yes, manlier fans. They won’t go gentle into that good night. They may rage against the dying of the light. And they might leave Ian Fleming Publications shaken if not stirred.