Every generation has unintentional icons – whether it’s Rosie the Riveter, the American flag, Elvis Presley, the motorcycle jacket – ideas that best express the zeitgeist of a time, a generation.

The emoticon found on phones today, of a happily smiling pile of excrement, is just that.  It best exemplifies the low state of the world, of the culture, and of America itself in the age of the primitive.  It signifies America’s rapid decay in the wake of the left’s decades-long war on Americanism, freedom, and individual rights.  The absence of morality – and by morality I mean a code of values – has led to an absence of the good.  And an abundance of poo.

Ayn Rand wrote that a nation’s culture is the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men, which their fellow citizens have accepted in whole or in part, and which have influenced the nation’s way of life.  Poo.

Post-9/11 America, and especially America in the Obama presidency, is a different world from America as she was before Obama, and before the left started its long march to destroy this nation.  America today is increasingly anti-freedom, anti-truth, anti-ideas, anti-capitalsim – anti-reason.  A nation built on a morality of reason has all but abandoned its foundational principles.  Public schools and academia produce zombies – goose-steppers like the Hitler Youth – who are militant and violent in their imposition of the leftist/Islamic agenda.  And when they do it, they congratulate themselves about how they have stood up against “fascism” and “intolerance,” when the intolerant fascists are they themselves.  Intellectually, young Americans are the most docile conformists, no matter how vocally and self-righteously they declare themselves free.  They have accepted as dogma all the philosophical beliefs of their elders of the hard left without question or exploration.  A continuing negation of life and self.

The culture is ugly.  The music is ugly, violent, and misogynistic.  Every crime drama and suspense series is rife with the most unimaginable gore.  Game of Thrones, Law and Order (Sex Crimes), American Horror Story – they’re all devoid of humanity and morality.  Devoid of goodness.  It’s a cultural rout.  It’s not that the line between good and evil has been blurred – it’s nonexistent.  We are living in a cultural free-for-all, or more accurately, a free fall.

Pain, blame, victimhood are the ideals.  When Pharrell performed his confection of a tune “Happy” at the Grammys, he was compelled to turn it into a dirge.  A bright, happy, sparkling little jewel of a tune was accompanied by ugly political rhetoric and costume, #handsup, hoodies, and a porter/bellman costume for Pharrell.

“Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy – a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.”  That’s from John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged.  Has America ever been farther from that ideal?

What better icon for such a culture of terror than a pile of dung with a smiley face?  It’s not just on phones; it’s on jewelry and shoes at Bloomingdales and Bergdorf Goodman.  A ring featuring this image goes for $500, shoes for $340.  It’s beloved.

A culture that would love such a thing is incapable of true humanity and love.  Hollywood is incapable of writing or producing a Casablanca.  There are no adults anymore – just petulant children who know nothing but to scream that they know everything and to heap contempt on anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their liberal fascism.  Logic and facts are scorned and derided; myths (global warning, “Islamophobia”) and feelings are held up as fact and science.

I was watching a movie not long ago, a dated fifties musical short on Turner Classic Movies. It was bursting with life.  The kids in the room wanted me to put on something gory, negative, dark, and I said, no, no, watch this, this is great stuff – this is America.  And one of the teens replied, no it’s not, that’s from when America was happy.  And that struck me.  It hit me like a ton of bricks.  The left has worked so hard to make us miserable, and has succeeded.

If you had to boil the culture down to its essential oils, it would be last Sunday’s Oscars – oh, how that once mighty American art genre has fallen.  

American traitor Edward Snowden got an Oscar; American hero Chris Kyle got the middle finger.  Even the traitorous far-left journalist Glenn Greenwald got an Oscars shout-out.  Of course Hollywood would reward vicious traitors.  There was no way the Hollywood establishment was going to give an Oscar to Clint Eastwood after he so delightfully skewered Obama’s empty chair. And their disdain for Americanism and the military is infused in everything they churn out.

During the Oscars ceremony, Hollywood congratulated itself on its bravery (none), diversity of ideas (none), and diversity of opinion (when there isn’t any allowed)?  Did you notice that whenever there was a mention of veterans, the camera cut to Bradley Cooper?  Apparently there weren’t any real veterans in the audience.  They had better things to do than witness this self-congratulatory love fest celebrating our cultural decline.

Hollywood, once a force for good, morality, love and romance, is now a force for evil, degradation, and cultural rape, cloaked in self-righteousness.  Patricia Arquette spoke out for equal rights for women.  Really?  Tell it to Neda Soltan, Noor Almaleki, Asia Hasan, Amina and Sarah Said, and the myriad other American Muslim women victimized by sharia. Patricia Arquette and her Hollywood friends wouldn’t dare speak up for them or the gender apartheid under Islamic law, but they weep for themselves and their pious, fallacious notions in their $10,000 ball gowns.

The Oscar show was typical Hollywood, epitomized by Neil Patirck Harris going on stage in his underwear.  What’s next?  Poo on the floor?  They’re devoid of talent, and they make up for it with vulgarity and potty jokes and congratulate themselves on how wonderful they are.

The one highlight of the telecast was a supreme Lady Gaga performing a sampling of songs from the great American musical classic, The Sound of Music.  It was superb.  There is something in that.  But no one in the ivory towers of America’s cultural power elite will take anything away from it.  Because the radical left has long abandoned the only real freedom any man (or woman) has – “free will,” the mind’s freedom to think or not.  And leftists seek to impose that evil upon us all.

Ayn Rand said, “There are two aspects of man’s existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art.”  Both of which have all but been extinguished in the era of amoralism – reflected in cultural rot and the exaltation of the crank.

Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here. Like her on Facebook here.