Homo and The Negro Masculinist Meditations On Politics and Popular Culture 9781940933146 1940933145
Homo and The Negro Masculinist Meditations On Politics and Popular Culture 9781940933146 1940933145
MASCULINIST MEDITATIONS ON
POLITICS & POPULAR CULTURE
by
JAMES J. O’MEARA
SECOND, EMBIGGENED EDITION
EDITED BY GREG JOHNSON
Counter-Currents Publishing
San Francisco
2017
Copyright © 2017 by James J. O’Meara
All rights reserved
Cover image:
Anthony van Dyck,
Portrait of Lord John Stuart and his brother Lord Bernard
Stuart (later Earl of Lichfield), circa 1638,
National Gallery, London
BF692.5.O596 2012
306--dc23
2012028370
CONTENTS
1. Five Years On: Preface to the Embiggened Edition
14. The Baker Street Männerbund: Some Thoughts on Holmes, Watson, Bond,
& Bonding
Sound
Vision
FOREWORD
My many intellectual debts will be easily seen in the pages that follow. But
first I must thank Greg Johnson, White Eminence of the North American New
Right, for encouraging me to write for his flagship blog, Counter-Currents, and
then having the notion that some of those pieces would look very nice between
hard covers.
In writing these and others I have benefited from online discussions with Ean
Frick as well as many commentators, including about half a dozen loyal,
possibly deeply disturbed, Constant Readers of my blog, and real-time
discussions with Collin Cleary, Jef Costello, and Derek Hawthorne.
I would also like to avail myself of the wise words of the moral philosopher
Richard Taylor, who disclaimed the customary “responsibility for any remaining
errors,” reasoning that one can only be responsible for what one is aware of, and
if he had been aware of any errors, he would have corrected them.
Vive, vale!
James J. O’Meara
Rust Belt, USA
June 13, 2012
“You must choose, brothers, you must choose.”
“In normal times, evil should be fought by good, but in times like this, well,
it should be fought by another kind of evil”
―Aereon (Judi Dench) near the beginning of
The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)
If, as Dr. Johnson said, no man but a blockhead ever wrote for anything but
money, the author of this one must be a blockhead of Peanuts proportions.
At the risk of what has come to be called “virtue-signaling,” may I say that
this was simply an attempt, not to make money, but to bring the Good News and
to change the world for the better.
So what was I trying to do?
At the time, I was heavily reading the work of Julius Evola; this itself
represented an evolution of sorts, as I had been introduced in my teens, through
1
Alan Watts, to the ideas of René Guénon and Ananda Coomaraswamy, the so-
called “Traditionalists,” and later induced, under the tutelage of Dr. John N.
2
Deck, to revere the more purely Western Neo-Platonists, especially Plotinus.
Evola, however, while firmly upholding the work of Guénon, took it in a new
3
direction, one which emphasized social concerns and even geopolitics. This
seemed much more interesting than just waiting around for the end of the Kali
Yuga, however spectacular that promised to be.
Steadily searching the intertubes for more on Evola, one day I came across the
writings of Alisdair Clarke, a theorist of what was then called the English New
Right. Clarke had given Evola’s work another turn of the screw, and developing
certain hints in Evola’s later books about Orders and Elites in the creation of
Aryan culture, had begun to explore the historical role of the Männerbund, the
4
bands of warrior youths, through his blog, Aryan Futurism.
A not entirely irrelevant point was that these bands were, as a friend once
usefully put it, “homoerotic though not necessarily homosexual.” Jack Donovan,
who would give this line of thought its most intensely practical developments,
5
later began calling them “androphilic.”
At this point the penny dropped, and I had what might modestly be described
as a world-shattering, epoch-making epiphany. As George Carlin said about
capitalism, I had nailed together two things that had never been nailed together
before.
There was a fatal inconsistency at the heart of the “radical Right,” which
tirelessly banged on about The White Race, Western man, Aryan Culture,
6
Odinism, etc., yet under the continuing widespread influence of what I came to
call “Judaic Family Values” maintained a loathing of any hint of the androphilic
associations that were characteristic of Aryan cultures and essential to the
creation and preservation of those cultures.
As for the more moderate, traditional Right of the “conservatives” or
Republicans, it was flawed as well; supposedly pragmatic and practical, their
even more entrenched Christian homophobia prevented them from accessing the
culture-creating and sustaining talents of the androphiles, leading to the Right’s
7
perennial status as “beautiful losers.”
Even Steve Sailer, one of the sharpest knives on the right side of the drawer,
seems nonplussed:
As I’ve mentioned before, the inner elite of the celebrated Black Lives
Matter movement is heavily homosexual. I think that was part of BLM’s
appeal to political, NGO, and corporate elites: BLM seemed safer than the
typical black agitators. These weren’t ex-con hard men like the Black
Panthers of yore, these were irate lesbians and peevish gays. How much
damage could they do? Well, judging from the extraordinary increase in
8
black-on-black homicides since Ferguson, a lot.
Contrarywise, the Left had reaped nothing but benefits from the perception of
being the “natural home” of these confirmed bachelors, who contributed their
unsurpassed talents in symbol manipulation, along with their disposable income
and all that non-family time on their hands to the cultural triumph of the Left;
while their contrived “gay” identity caused them to “swerve”—to use Camille
Paglia’s term—from their role as guardians of traditional Western culture into
9
lives of empty promiscuity and consumerism.
And yet, as I recalled from dim memories of New York clubland (as they say,
10
if you remember Limelight, you weren’t there), there was no more “implicitly
White” an autonomous zone than a gay dance club, especially on Tuesday
11
nights.
While some, like Paul Gottfried, have noted the rise to dominance of the
originally and still predominantly Jewish NeoCons, (almost?) no one had sussed
out that the rot had set in long before, in the open-air insane asylum of First
12
Century Palestine.
I don’t recall if Alisdair brought up the idea of developing these ideas myself,
or if I was only inspired by his own blog (a new tool for dissemination of ideas
at the time), but it seemed unusual enough and important enough that I decided
to get this down in writing.
Since all this was taking place in the intersection of art, religion, and politics,
it occurred to me that the best vehicle would be a Manifesto, as favored by
groups ranging from the Rosicrucians to the Communists to the Surrealists and
13
Futurists (Aryan Futurism, indeed!) Something along the lines of de Sade’s
14
“Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans.”
Hence, the broad strokes and blunt, bald assertions, leaving the reader the task
of finding cites and making connections, if he wanted to, before taking it as a
guide to action. I also found this to be an excellent way to overcome a decades-
long writers block.
15
Another influence, from student days, was Marshall McLuhan. Wikipedia
says:
While some critics have taken issue with McLuhan’s writing style and
mode of argument, McLuhan himself urged readers to think of his work as
“probes” or “mosaics” offering a toolkit approach to thinking about the
media. His eclectic writing style has also been praised for its postmodern
16 17
sensibilities and suitability for virtual space.
“Mosaic,” of course, was the browser that popularized the web, and since the
18
Manifesto was first published online, I intended to make full use of hyperlinks
to create an experience of what Michael Hoffman calls “loose cognition” and
19
which he believes is necessary for grasping new ideas. Again, Jack Donovan
was one of the few who “got it,” saying “Reading [the Manifesto] is a
psychedelic experience.”
Perhaps the most decisive influence, or perhaps just the most useful way to
look at what I was doing, came again from Alan Watts; this time, ironically, from
the period after his abandonment of Traditionalism.
Rather than seeking some supposed “transcendental unity” above, behind, or
perhaps beneath the variety of religions and cultures,
Marshall McLuhan: I heard what you were saying! You know nothing of
my work! You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you got to teach a
course in anything is totally amazing!
Recently, another work has appeared on the New Right itself that appears to
take the same archetypal or physiognomic approach to Western Culture: Jason
Reza Jorjani’s Prometheus and Atlas (London: Arktos, 2016) where the titular
Titans of Greek mythology are envisioned as spectral presences that literally
haunt or inhabit the minds of the West; I consider it the only work since Sexual
Personae to command the same cultural heights and plunge to the same cultural
43
depths. Together, along with Spengler, they could form a concise bookshelf for
the New Right autodidact.
Along with the one in your hand, dear Reader.
For quite some time people have been writing analyses of the futility of the
Right (perhaps best summarized by the title of Sam Francis’s book Beautiful
45
Losers). How can a movement that seems so, well, right, seem to get nowhere,
either losing outright or, when in power, never, as Evelyn Waugh said of the
British Tories, turning the clock back one bit. Apparently none of these essays
has been useful, or used, and so the self-examination has not ceased.
This essay takes a different tack; I want to locate the peculiar futility of the
Right, especially its American version, in a more general sexual-cultural
critique. I locate the futility factor in two related areas: its Judeo-Christianity,
and its consequent homophobia. Whether a movement sans these features could
be recognized as “The Right” is not really a problem for anyone interested in
praxis rather than mere taxonomy; for now, let me suggest that “gay Rightist” is
no more absurd than “gay rabbi.”
To anticipate, let me say that I agree with many on the Right that
“homophobia” is indeed an absurd term; however, apart from being the most
readily understandable, it does convey some truth: the Right’s futility is rooted in
what is, indeed, a fear of homosexuality.
In a nutshell: the American Right, or the Republican party, cannot be a vehicle
for the preservation and expansion of White culture, since its Judeo-Christian
element leads it to oppose the culture-creating and culture-sustaining element of
homoeroticism, while ultimately embracing, in the name of equality and
multiculturalism, its opposite, the Negro.
While obviously not all Aryan cultural figures are homosexual, we may take
the Homosexual as the ideal type in a masculinist, homoerotic system; in the
same way, not all liberals are Negroes, but for the same reasons we may take the
Negro as the ideal type, which is to say, that human type to which the system
inexorably leads to or valorizes.
I.
THE FRUIT OF THE POISONOUS TREE
Again, in a nutshell: once the American Right chose to base itself on Judeo-
Christianity, its assimilation to the Left was a mathematical inevitability.
Why? Just as no people has reached a high level of culture without some
acceptance of homosexuals in that culture, as a function of a more general
cultural bias that might best be called more broadly “masculinist”; so no political
movement can achieve dominance, or even influence, without a similar
worldview; nor would it be worth supporting even if it did prevail.
An excellent summary of what a masculinist movement would be has been
provided by Ean Frick: it would be “possessed of a heathen morality and thus
certainly open to homosexuals. It would oppose the feminized, Judeo-Christian
culture of being a passive viewer or consumer of life and would propose a new
46
culture of excellence, creativity and active participation in all aspects of life.”
For more detail, see the works of Hans Blüher, the ideologue of the German
youth movement (the Wandervogel) and the historical male Männerbund, whose
influence extended even to such Rightist icons as Baron Evola and Francis
Parker Yockey; original texts of the Masculinist movement can be found in
47
Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany, while the late
48
Alisdair Clarke’s blog Aryan Futurism contains valuable modern contributions.
In short, the Right has ceded cultural domination to the Left, by leaving it to
be the only place publicly tolerating and indeed welcoming what the Right
perceives as “deviance.” The recent takeover of the Right by the Trotskyite-
Democratic-Judaics known as “neocons” is only a sideshow, interesting only as
being the latest and most blatant, and thus most obvious and revealing (as in the
Masonic “Revelation of the Method”) form of this more basic transformation;
once their Christian stooges soften things up, the Judaics can then step in to take
the place of the Right’s missing “intellectual elite.”
In a truly diabolical “turn of the screw,” of course, the welcoming Left hardly
promulgates a “masculinist” mentality either. Rather than the unnatural demon
of the Right’s imagination, the Left first promoted the supposedly “liberating”
promiscuity and general sex-obsession of certain parts of the “gay community”
(the feminizing word “community” is itself revealing); when AIDS made that
unfashionable, they now promote the entirely feminized model of “I’m limp-
wristed and hate football, but you accept me!”
Where once a distorted image of the male Männerbund in the form of San
Francisco-style libertinage (still observable in the infamous “Folsom Street
Fair”) was at least offered, now there is the demand (on both society and gays
themselves) for “marriage equality,” the ultimate capitulation to Judaic “family
values.” As gay-libertarian-Buchananite Justin Raimondo has said, marriage is
for women and lesbians, who can bear children; what possible interest could a
man, straight or gay, have in it?
So while the Right deprives itself of the elitist cultural creativity of
homosexuals, the Left “accepts” and thus attracts them, but then demands
submission to an anti-cultural feminist-socialist-egalitarian “Gay” identity.
In both cases, the masculinist forces of White culture are rendered inoperative.
Of course, the “choice” of Judeo-Christianity is more of an historical
inevitability, given the nature of the elements that have made up, in varying
proportions, the American Right, rather than a literal act in time, like the
convention that promulgated what came to be known as “The Fundamentals,”
hence “Fundamentalism.” By definition, a mass movement is made up of
average Americans, hence Christians, mostly of a dreary Protestant type.
The best place to locate such a formal choice might be the moment when
William Buckley expelled the Randians from the movement. Of course, Ayn
Rand was a tedious nut job, but the ground for her dismissal was her atheism.
That W. F. B. was a Catholic might have made this inevitable; that the chosen
means was a review of Atlas Shrugged by Whittaker Chambers, and that the
party it was meant to please was represented in America by Archbishop
Spellman, both semi-closeted homosexuals, is a delicious irony, emblematic of
the important role of homosexuals in the American Right, where even Buckley
himself gave off a distinctive air of epicene sophistication inconceivable in
today’s Gingrich-Beck American Right. Toss in (or out) J. Edgar Hoover and
Roy Cohn, and it’s hard to image what the American Right would have been or
accomplished without the tacit support of the faygeles.
II.
HOMOEROTIC OR HOMOSEXUAL?
But what does this really have to do with masculinism? Have I simply
conflated masculinism with homosexuality? While I would defend a bell curve-
like distribution of cultural creativity as heavily skewed to the homosexual (even
Steve Sailer called Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae the most important book of
the last 20 years), thus explaining the Right’s loss of cultural dominance, the
effects of this cultural homophobia are much wider.
There is a relentless slippage between what is perceived as “gay” and all
positive cultural qualities that are (1) easy to identify and (2) possessed by
homos in optimum form.
Thus every culture-creating male bonding organization (the priesthood, the
military, the Boy Scouts, bodybuilding, etc.) is presumed “gay” (and thus, “bad”)
whether or not any move from the homoerotic to homosexual occurs (i.e.,
whether or not one moves from masculinist to homosexual) and despite their
own (Judaic-influenced) public denials. Ironically, the most officially
homophobic organizations in America are widely, and correctly, treated exactly
as a bunch of homos.
At a pop cultural level, consider the mainstream and Leftist mockery of the
movie 300, which (despite any number of real flaws) concentrated on
“impossible six-packs” and other supposed elements of “homoeroticism.” An
earlier film containing masculinist themes, Fight Club, was met with similar
smears, which were renewed more recently when the book’s author voluntarily
“came out,” leading to his astute observation that this is “a way of negating a
story that they can’t be with. Things used to be dismissed as, ‘Oh, that’s just a
black thing,’ and now it’s, ‘Oh, that’s just a gay thing.’ That just kind of smacks
49
of dismissal.”
50
Like the Jewish and Judeo-Christian authors of The Pink Swastika, even
liberal movie reviewers can think of no insult greater than sniggering about
something being “gay” and if the targets profess no such “gayness,” then it must
be “unconscious” and thus even funnier.
III.
THE JUDAIC CONTAGION
The origin of the American Right’s homophobia is, of course, its acceptance
of Judeo-Christianity.
Obviously, various approaches to homosexuality have existed in various
cultures, and nothing like the Liberal idea of unlimited “sexual freedom” has
ever really existed. Every culture “structures” homosexuality, like everything
else, in socially approved ways. Still, however male-male relations have been
51
structured—see for example Crompton’s Homosexuality and Civilization or
52
Hardman’s Homoaffectionalism, which is an easier read, and more focused on
“masculinist” issues, even though he doesn’t seem to have heard of the concept
—homoeroticism has only been entirely condemned by Judaic culture, and
consequently by those based on it: the Christian and Islamic. Other cultures have
seen Judaism as distinctly “odd” on the subject, and Judaics have been pleased to
take pride in their “purity” on this matter, so I think this is a fair characterization.
Using a variation on the “one drop” definition of race in the American South,
we can see that any acceptance of homosexuality in a culture (only with slaves;
only until the beard grows, etc.), however opposed to the “anything goes” model
of “gay liberation” makes it, for our purposes, homosexual-friendly. No bishop
could get away, for example, with saying “I condemn sex between men. I do,
however, endorse the fine Spartan practice of kidnapping small boys and
educating them in the ways of manhood.”
The implications of this, however, are seldom thought through. It is obvious, I
think, that the acceptance of “one drop homosexuality” is itself merely a
superficial symptom of a more important factor: these cultures are actually based
on a masculinist ethos. Again, it is obvious that these cultures are the ones that
have produced the great moments of civilization that “The Right” seems to laud,
such as Athens and Florence, causing and being caused by such masculinist
elements as hierarchy, elitism, and striving for personal greatness.
And it is obvious that they stand in stark contrast to Judaic civilization, which,
at least after the Babylonian disaster, has been family-and-reproduction oriented,
53
conformist, repressive, uncreative, and parasitic on those who are.
What then, does Judeo-Christianity “contribute” to the American Right along
with its “superior” anti-homoerotic moralism? (For anyone who is still inclined
to accept that cliché, I recommend re-reading the passage from Frithjof Schuon
quoted above.) Exactly the anti-cultural doctrines of “equality,” “love thy
enemy,” etc. that the Right supposedly opposes, which are destroying our
culture, and whose secularized counterparts make up the even more virulent
doctrines of the Left.
Thus the American Right presents a false and therefore futile opposition,
whose doctrines, superficially “opposed” to the Left, make it an enticing
stopping point on the way to the Left.
These secularized versions of these Judeo-Christian doctrines found on the
Left are, admittedly, more “liberal” but not in any way that makes them less
harmful to White culture, just as some Jews are “more strict” than others, while
remaining Jews.
For example, while the Judeo-influenced American Right demonizes
homosexuals as unnatural monsters of sexual appetite, the Judeo-influenced Left
initially agreed as well; homosexuality was “bourgeois decadence” for Marxists
while the lunch-bucket Old Left hated “da fags.” Then, after Stonewall, the
Lifestyle Left promoted the same model of animalistic sexuality, only presented
as positive “sexual freedom.” When AIDS caused that to go tits up, they
regrouped and now promote gay marriage (significantly, now marketed as
“marriage equality” to make it isomorphic with its other causes) because “gays
are just like everyone else” (leveling equality again). This, in turn, is more easily
sold to the “Right” as a compassionate compromise (Andrew Sullivan’s
muscular glutes are the main transmission belt) which everyone can join in on;
after all, we all endorse “family values,” right?
On every issue, the American Right not only demonizes its own elite, but
presents traditional Right positions (say, from the Conservative Revolution of
pre-war Germany) only after they have been run through the Judaic Family
Values machine, emerging in grotesque, distorted, and unusable forms, not
unlike what happens to anything that goes through Judaic scientist Jeff
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Goldblum’s teleporter in The Fly.
For example, think of “really Right-wing” ideas like the “Right to Life.” This
is a function of the “every sperm is equal” mentality of Judeo-Christianity. No
attempt to genetically improve or even protect the White race is allowed, while
lesser races are allowed to breed freely. The same with opposition to birth
control and capital punishment. The “conservative” Catholics are the best gift
the Judaics ever gave the Left.
Civil Rights? Well, this has already been lost, with the neocon takeover and
the resulting compulsory adulation of Martin Luther King as the Greatest
American/Christian/Compassionate Conservative of all time. Sam Francis was
among the Real Right figures who were sacrificed to the mob for this one, while
the Republicans proudly point to their African-American party leader as a kind
of Shadow Obama.
Immigration? An interesting opportunity to see a real-time example of the
Marxist idea of “unequal development of the base and superstructure” (i.e.,
economics determines culture, except when it doesn’t). The conservative masses
aren’t buying it yet, but all the “respectable” conservatives are on board: George
H. W. Bush and his “little brown grandkids,” John McCain on “reform,” the Wall
Street Journal on “open borders,” etc. Once again, to hell with tradition, culture,
the White race; we’re all equal in God’s sight, right?
To quickly grasp the Masculinist position on these issues, consider the
response of Leonidas to the Persian ambassadors in 300.
IV.
THE NEGRO
CONCLUSION
As Julius Evola and René Guénon knew, nothing was more useless, or
positively dangerous, than “conservatives” that merely seek to preserve some old
institutions, without asking what principles they were grounded in—the
principles themselves being the only thing there was any point in “preserving,”
and thus the necessity not of stupidly preserving “what was” but rather of
finding the right principles in the first place.
If the “Right” had any intelligence, they would be resolutely stripping
themselves of any traces of Judeo-Christian inspired negritude, and encouraging
masculinist forces whatever their possible homoerotic content, asking
themselves: “Who is smearing this cultural element as ‘gay’? Our Negro, Judaic,
and Christian enemies, that’s who!”
HOMOSEXUALITY,
“TRADITIONALISM,” &
REALLY-EXISTING TRADITION
It’s a rare experience to find one’s self battling bourgeois “Traditionalism” at
the side of Baron Julius Evola, and I gotta say, I like it!
Shortly after the war, Baron Evola found himself the target of some aspersions
from self-styled “Traditionalists” which led him to these valuable reflections on:
Such passages occur throughout his writing, but this one is interesting for
containing both points I want to draw attention to. Traditionalists, by and large,
are born and raised in modernized Western societies, and acquire their
knowledge of Tradition largely through books. Daniélou is unique in having,
admittedly at a later age, undergone the education of a traditional young man,
and lived in a traditional society. He is thus fully aware of both the actual role
played by homosexuals in such societies, as well as the objective, technical
knowledge of it possessed by every educated man. (He is also the author of the
standard modern English translation of the Kama Sutra.)
Even on a “principial” level, Daniélou has no patience with such simple-
minded shuffling of “archetypes,” pointing out that if there are two basic
principles, light and dark, male and female, etc., then there must be many
“resultant intermediate states.” Shiva, for example, is not merely paired with
Shakti, but manifests in many forms, some bisexual or hermaphroditic, which
61
are the subject of numerous homosexual cults.
All this is in contrast to say, Guénon, who learned his “Eastern Metaphysics”
in Paris, from some traveling Hindus. The dangers of this were immediately
apparent in his condemnation of Buddhism as a heresy in his early works (unlike
Evola, whose Doctrine of Awakening promoted Pali Buddhism as a true Aryan
path).
Just as Guénon learned his anti-Buddhism prejudice from bigoted Hindus, and
then “derived it from the Principles of Tradition,” so Perry and company read
their Western, Semitic prejudices into their discussion of homosexuality.
Daniélou reveals that when Guénon eventually felt the need for some “hands
on” experience, and wanted to settle in India, the British refused him a visa.
Thus his “seeking refuge in traditional Egypt” was actually his second choice.
Daniélou regrets that Guénon was unable to avail himself of living Hindu
traditions, which might have lent more nuance to his overly intellectual and
62
abstract works. Indeed, how different the overly-Islamized world of
“Traditionalism” would be had he been able to join Daniélou in India; and how
uncomfortable the “Traditionalists” must be today, stuck with their “last valid
revelation” in post-9/11 America.
But perhaps they have only their petty-bourgeois conformism to blame. For
what kind of world would Guénon have actually found in Cairo? Fortunately, we
63
have the more recent work of John R. Bradley to set the record straight on
homosexuality and traditional Islamic societies. His journalistic account of really
existing traditional Arab societies (where boys proudly seek wealthy patrons,
and gay-bashing is as unknown as “Gay Pride” parades) parallels Daniélou’s
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account of how reasonable and homo-friendly Tradition was until challenged
by imported notions of “vice,” first Victorian, then “modernist” (and now,
perhaps, “Traditionalist”).
For a more “academic” perspective, Ziauddin Sadar surveys the Qur’an and
hadith and concludes:
You would think that after the revelations about Schuon’s later activities, and
even Evola’s remarks on whipping and deflowering virgins, the Traditionalists
67
would steer clear of offering advice on sexuality.
Still, we find much wisdom in an argument Schuon used in a different context,
and with suitable though slight modifications, it can serve as our warning to
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Traditionalists who would enter these topics:
Wulf Grimsson
Loki’s Way: The Path of the Sorcerer in the Age of Iron
Second Edition
Lulu.com, 2011
A few weeks ago I was privileged to receive this unsolicited review copy, “the
result of over 30 years of research, study and practice,” by Wulf Grimsson. I’ve
been trying to read, and then review, the contents ever since, but found it
difficult. Not because of the writing—Wulf is admirably clear and free of both
“scholarly” stodginess and “occult” rigmarole—but precisely because of its
dense content of interesting and important ideas. Almost every page gives one
something to think about, a source to look up and perhaps reconsider, an
inspiration to a new connection made for one’s self.
Why I should have been selected for this privilege is plain from the contents.
Loki’s Way covers the whole range of topics I’ve explored on my blog, outside of
the more pedestrian political and economic ones, from the Männerbund to
mystery traditions to runes, from Nietzsche to Evola to Colin Wilson. I am above
all grateful for Wulf’s freeing me from the mild guilt I have felt about all the
topics I haven’t done to adequate length, as well as my regret that the late
Alisdair Clarke did not live to produce a similar treatise from his path-breaking
blog, Aryan Futurism. My Constant Readers will find Loki’s Way to be essential
reading.
But first let Wulf define his subject: “Loki’s Way is an adaptation of the Left
Hand Path or sorcery for the Kali Yuga. This tradition has taken many forms
throughout the centuries, in the modern age it must be updated to deal with new
discoveries in science and psychology” (p. 62).
The last part there also brings up another reason I’ve had trouble writing about
this book. I have grave reservations about much of the material in the first third,
and thus, as Wulf expresses it here, in a sense his whole project. I would prefer
that he take Guénon’s advice and forget about “reconciling” science and
Tradition and especially “updating” the latter by the former. Not only should the
process be reversed, judging Science by the timeless principles of Tradition, but
the process is necessarily unending, as Science by contrast is the realm of the
amorphous and ever-changing, requiring the “synthesis” (really, as Guénon
would point out, syncretism) to be redone over and over—although I’m sure the
publishers appreciate that!
In particular, I think that Wulf’s claim that “the esoteric is the physiological,”
i.e., the “discovery” that what esoteric Tradition has been talking about in
guarded language can “now be revealed” (as the New Age publishers would
shout) as being techniques for manipulating the endocrine and other bodily
systems, is really just a misreading of what Evola among others has described as
the starting point that remains when all dogmas and theories have been tested
and abandoned, in the alchemical abyss:
But then the individual finds himself confronting his body, which is the
fundamental nexus of all the conditions of his state. The consideration of
the connection between the ego principle in its double form of thought and
deed and corporeality . . . and the transformation of said connection by
means of well-defined, practical, and necessary acts, even though they are
essentially interior, constitutes the essential core of the Royal Art of the
hermetic masters.
Evola adds:
The latter will be directed first of all to the conquest of the principle of
immortality, and then to the total stable nature, no longer transitory or
deteriorating . . . by which the human manifestation is established within
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the realm of becoming.
What Evola calls alchemy or The Royal Art, Wulf calls . . . sorcery:
The bit about the Will reminds us that Evola was compelled to treat Crowley
with some respect, despite his deplorable life and personality, as someone who
Knew Things. Wulf goes Evola one better and brings in Crowley explicitly.
Another thing he brings in explicitly, and much to my heart, is the
Männerbund, which Evola only relatively briefly discusses. Wulf connects the
dots between the historical Männerbund and the esoteric path to individual
immortality followed by the elite—in contrast to the common fate in store for
the followers of the Vedic “path of the fathers,” Evola’s realm of society beneath
the State, my own contrast of Family Values and Wild Boys. For Wulf it’s
replicators versus Sorcerers.
The Männerbund or Warrior Band is the origin of the esoteric path, because
the latter is, au fond, a battle; which Wulf explains, typically, in equal parts
Sufism and Dawkins:
So, paradoxically, only the Warrior Band, the Group, can provide the context
for true individuation:
We might also suggest, this self-selected group that never the less valorizes
individual male excellence—thus, androphilic if not homosexual—is the
solution to the paradox that Michael O’Meara has observed: the White race
contains an overemphasis on the individual against society, which, while
contributing to our creative dynamism, can be exploited by our enemies to
render us uninterested in or even hostile to concern for our own race.
This warrior elite, devoted to realizing a higher principle, is the origin of the
Traditional Aryan State, which is oriented to a transcendent principle, in contrast
to the common herd and its promiscuous “wants” and “needs” (think: peasant
frivolity vs. the Templars) and thus also the social stratification characteristic of
Aryan society (p. 72):
The sorcerer and warrior both have the potential to become Overman via
different means or by combining paths. Loki’s Way is the modern
equivalent of [Georges Dumézil’s] first function combined with a warrior
ethic. It can be applied via the mode of the lone wolf, with a blood brother
or in a Männerbund. The teaching level of the sorcerer and warrior is
esoteric and left hand path. (p. 74)
At this point, the story takes a turn that may give the average reader a turn
himself, but not our Constant Readers:
As organic and social memes are dissolved new forms of sexuality and
emotional bonding needs to be created. Every man has androphilic
potential, it just has to be activated and directed. Since the transition to the
Overman is unnatural and works against the normal evolutionary process
which favours reproduction then the focus must be on same-sex bonding.
(p. 112)
Which leads to chapters discussing both historical traditions from India to the
Norsemen, and modern theorists from Edward Carpenter to Hans Blüher to Jack
Malebranche. Especially important are his careful dissection of the various
“models” of homosexuality that have gone into creating the modern notions of
“homosexual” and “gay,” and analyzing their usefulness for the Left Hand Path.
The [Uranian] model was popularised by both Ulrichs and Hirschfeld and
ultimately proves wanting. It confuses intersex and transgenderism with
homosexuality. While this is not surprising due to the early period of their
work it is still a view popular today. It seems an ongoing slur in a culture
which devalues women and sees them as “less than men” to associate men
who take the passive sexual role as female. It could be argued that this
identification has its roots in misogyny and was later fed by Judeo-
Christian thinking. Many also believe that the idea of seeing a homosexual
as a woman in a man’s body led to the medicalization of homosexuality
which continued right through to the 1960s.
The Intermediate Sex model [Carpenter] is significant as the shaman,
priest and androphile warrior existing outside the normal structures of the
society. At the same time I think we need to be careful using the term third
or intermediate sex as it infers a state which is not quite one or the other,
rather than as one which is both. The masculinist model of Brand and others
(it is also found represented in the work of Jack Malebranche today,
Androphilia) is appealing and certainly relevant.
Personally I we think we need to develop a new model for our sexuality
hence terms like Androphilia and the Männerbund need to be understood in
a new way. This is especially significant since we are talking about same-
sex relations in terms of a unique goal not as an everyday preference. For
the Männerbund androphilia is a special form of “sacred” bond which is
expressed between warriors; it is also initiatory.
All comrades have a male and female side and clearly since they are
working to transcend human restrictions would have no problems exploring
passive or active sex roles. The genders within us, so to speak, represent a
great source of power and we may use cross dressing or passive techniques
for Seidr work but also have no issue with being warriors for Galdr (active
runic sorcery) or even in battle. (p. 129)
Behold! the rituals of the old time are black. Let the evil ones be cast
away; let the good ones be purged by the prophet! Then shall this
Knowledge go aright.—Liber AL vel Legis II:5.
In this verse we are given clear instructions about how to deal with the
old schools of magic, esotericism and their formulae. The “old time” are the
Older Aeons. These rituals are black, that is they should not be used until
reassessed by New Aeon formula. Since most are based on the sacrificial
image of the Dying God they must be purified and cleansed.
Those which cannot be changed will be disposed of, those that can be
purified can be adapted. As discussed throughout this book, Traditional
forms of spirituality must be radically re-examined both in terms of Loki’s
Way. Old age fertility rites must be cast away, let the blood brotherhood of
Set and Horus Reign!
“The only thing that really saddens me over my demise is that I shall not be
here to read the nonsense that will be written about me and my works and
my motives. . . . There will be lists of apocryphal jokes I never made and
gleeful misquotations of words I never said. What a pity I shan’t be here to
enjoy them.”
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—The Noël Coward Diaries, March 19, 1955
“White”
—from a list of things with “style,” solicited
from Sir Noël for an ad by Gillette razor blades.
In this context, it may be instructive to examine the case of Sir Noël Coward,
“The Master,” who practically invented the idea of “The Englishman” in the
20th century, as an example of such full-hearted, un-ironic “defending and
glorifying our civilization.”
Was Coward a “conservative”? It seems odd to those who remember him, if at
all, as the campy cabaret entertainer of the ’50s and ’60s. When Coward’s
Diaries were published in 1982, Variety was puzzled: “It’s a bit startling to
discover that Coward was a ‘political reactionary,’” quoting his views on Suez:
“The good old imperialism was a bloody sight wiser than all this woolly-headed,
muddled ‘all men are equal’ humanitarianism which has lost us so much pride
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and dignity and prestige in the modern world.”
Rather than accepting such loaded terms as “reactionary,” we can certainly
designate Coward as a “conservative” or “man of the Right” as Paul Gottfried
has recently defined the term:
The Right by its nature is anti-egalitarian and favors hierarchy over the idea
(or chimera) of universal individual equality. It is also committed to
preserving organic institutions in which families and communities can
survive. It is profoundly skeptical of any scheme that seeks to advance
some notion of human perfection, and especially in the modern world, the
Right should be fighting doggedly against social engineering and
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leveling.
Jere Real reviewed the work of Coward back in 1976 and came to the same
diagnosis, but with this useful caveat:
How fortunate I was to have been born poor. If Mother had been able to
send me to private school, Eton and Oxford or Cambridge, it would
probably have set me back years. I have always distrusted too much
education and intellectualism. . . . My good fortune was to have a bright,
acquisitive but not, not an intellectual mind, and to have been impelled by
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circumstances to get out and earn my living.
Yet no one loved England (climate apart) and its common people more than
Coward, as his friend the Queen was first to acknowledge. “England may
be a very small island, vastly overcrowded, frequently badly managed,” he
wrote, “but very much the best and bravest in the world.” Repeatedly he
flaunts his pride in the Scottish and English blood to which he owes his
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success.
That success, early on, came from work that, though superficially as
“decadent” and “modern” as the Bright Young Products of Oxbridge, was
actually bringing the critical eye of a practical, working-class mind to their
intellectual pretensions.
Like his contemporary Evelyn Waugh, Coward created a character, what
Kenneth Tynan later called his “protective pose” (Reader, p. 522), which made
him seem to be of that very milieu, while employing a subtle wit to create
aesthetically pleasing and enjoyable works that also mockingly expose the flaws
in “the modern age.”
As Guillaume Faye advises, “It is mocking and ‘eccentric’ brainwaves that
should lay the foundations” for any critique, a principle also well known to the
Surrealists (“Gravity lies in what does not appear serious”—André Breton) and
the Situationists (“subversive ideas can only come from the pleasure
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principle”—Raoul Vaneigem).
Coward was far from a flapper or a toff, but rather an honest and sympathetic
participant-observer and conservative critic, in the same way Burroughs played
with crime and drugs and Kerouac with irresponsibility, but were not themselves
“Beat” as that “lifestyle” was distilled from their works by the mass media. In
the same way Coward writes of hopelessly romantic couples while privately, in
his letters and diaries, disdaining the very idea of “love.”
The pose was solidified for all time after his first major success, his play The
Vortex (which was almost banned until a surprisingly perceptive civil servant
noted that this mélange of drugs and incest served a serious aim, and observed
that “if we ban this we shall have to ban Hamlet”) when he allowed himself to be
photographed in Chinese garb, in bed, with a look of “advanced degeneracy”
caused (he later said) by the flashbulb. But his teasing interviews were designed
to leave the same impression: his mind is “frightfully depraved” and “a mass of
corruption” due to incessant visits to “opium dens, cocaine dens” (Reader, p.
103).
There is certainly no attempt to advance any kind of “gay agenda.” The
“camp” of Demi-Monde was a serious attempt to explore morality that had been
shattered but not destroyed by the First World War (as he says quite openly in his
Preface) and Bitter Sweet is intended as parody of Wilde, not hagiography.
Eventually real or affected decadence led to a nervous breakdown, where his
treatment involved composing a list of good and bad qualities—among the
former: “common sense.”
Gradually, his “exploration” of modernity modulated to an open
disillusionment with this life of bobbed hair and cigarettes; were people really
happy?
By dancing
Much faster
You’re chancing
Disaster
Time alone will show
(“Poor Little Rich Girl”)
“These words from me may surprise you” indeed; and three years later, in
1928, Coward is even more emphatic, and specific:
Indeed, as Spengler observed five years later (in a book published by same house
as The Noël Coward Reader today), “jazz music and Negro dancing [are
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performing] the Dead March for a great Culture.”
All this subtly subversive work culminated in 1931, when encapsulating the
“essential psychology” of his time in the classic song “Twentieth Century
Blues.”
One might think, if one were under the “general perception” of him, that the
ensuing Depression and war would leave a campy social critic like Coward
without a subject. But what was called for was patriotism and belief in the
British spirit, and these were hardly alien.
And while it would be inaccurate and even absurd to think Coward welcomed
the war, it did give him the opportunity to exercise his profoundly conservative
instincts in a more open, as it were out of the closet, fashion.
Coward’s patriotic work was on two fronts; one was more public than ever, to
buck up British spirits with a play, Blythe Spirits, a song, “London Pride,” and a
movie, In Which We Serve. “To make that film he had to overcome extraordinary
opposition from high up, only to have it turn into a major artistic and morale-
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building hit.”
The other was more secretive: undercover work promoting, among other
things, US involvement in the war. Though some conservatives might prefer the
“isolationist” side from today’s perspective, Coward, like Lindbergh after Pearl
Harbor, was simply defending his homeland from attack by outsiders.
This is again consistent with Gottfried’s notion of “conservative”:
[F]riend/enemy distinctions are natural to how people live. The way out of
this situation, even when it becomes heated, should not be through
international administrative regulation of individual human lives for the
sake of perpetual peace and brother- or sisterhood. Such utopian efforts can
only lead to tyranny and the utter destruction of traditional ways of life. The
best we can do in dealing with conflict is to control and channel violence
through timely diplomacy and only if absolutely necessary, military
interventions.
Rooted in real connection to his country, Coward’s patriotism did not entail
any ideological demonizing of the German enemy, or a demand for
“unconditional surrender” (the typical motive of the modern war of “humanism”
versus “enemies of humanity”), and certainly no dream of a post-war “world
administration,” whose actual manifestations, displacing the beloved Empire, he
despised. As Guillaume Faye has said:
No modern neocon or liberal ideologue could have the sense of his enemy’s
humanity that would allow him to see the ironic humor in a song like:
Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans
When our victory is ultimately won,
It was just those nasty Nazis who persuaded them to fight
And their Beethoven and Bach are really far worse than their bite
Let’s be meek to them—
And turn the other cheek to them
And try to bring out their latent sense of fun.
Let’s give them full air parity
And treat the rats with charity,
But don’t let’s be beastly to the Hun.
Now [on the day that Stars and Stripes headlined “Kick this bum out of the
country”], Noël opened in Paris with Maurice Chevalier, whom the
American soldiers were sure was a collaborator, and with Marlene Dietrich,
whom they were sure was a German spy. . . . I went to see Noël before the
performance, and I said . . . what are you going to do about it? Sir Noël
said, “First I shall calm them, and then I shall sing some of my very
excellent songs.” So I went out and stood at the back by the exit, and Noël
came on to a deathly hush, which he’s not used to. A deathly hush. And
then he looked at them and said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, and all you dear,
dear, sniveling little boys from Brooklyn . . .” And they fell down and
absolutely loved it.
I love the Navy, I inherited my affection for it, all my mother’s family were
Navy. Admirals and Captains. I love everything to do with the Navy. To
start with they’ve got the best manners in the world and I love the sea and
Navy discipline, which is very hard. It wouldn’t have frightened me
because I’m quite disciplined anyway, and I’m used to accepting discipline.
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I would have loved to have been in the Navy.
The combination of pride in family heritage and personal predilection for self-
discipline are expressed honestly, while in these days of “gay sensibility” as well
as official “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies they seem almost “camp.”
Even Churchill’s opposition couldn’t stop his writing and acting in the classic
film, In Which We Serve, a tribute to his friend, Lord Mountbatten, as well as to
the regular sailors, whom he demanded be detailed to the production instead of
actors. That confidence in the “ordinary man” was rewarded by performances
that led the Admiralty Head of Personnel to exclaim: “By Jove, Coward, that
convinces me you were right to ask for a proper ship’s company, real sailors. No
actors could have possibly done that” (Reader, p. 432).
Although it must be said that when he gave his patriotism too free a hand (in
the wartime isolationist-bashing Time Remembered, the pre-war Post-Mortem, or
the post-war Peace in our Time) it tended to become strident and a bit hysterical,
forgetting his first rule of the dandy’s pose: “The greatest thing in the world is
not to be obvious—over ANYTHING.”
If the early Coward developed an aristocratic veneer for solidly working-class
values, and the wartime Coward was a simple spokesman for a patriotism
considered old-fashioned if not criminal, the post-war Coward now became the
“surprisingly” reactionary. Coward hadn’t changed; what had changed was
England. Having won the war, would it now win the peace?
Coward had his doubts; the post-war “Festival of Britain” was like Britain
itself: “the last word in squalor and completely ungay” causing him to riposte
with the lugubriously conservative, almost Guénonian “Bad Times are Just
Around the Corner”:
The ’50s were indeed a bad time for Coward, who was put on the shelf by
critics who found him, and his work, terribly old-fashioned, though the public
never deserted him.
His send-up of “modern” art, Nude with Violin, based, of course, not on rival
“theories” but his own experience as an amateur painter, ran for over a year but
was ignored by the critics.
Sebastien: I don’t think anyone knows about painting anymore. Art, like
human nature, has got out of hand.
Since he wasn’t taken seriously in the theatre anymore, Coward even tossed
aside the pose and began to speak over the heads of the critics, directly to the
public, in a serious of articles for the Sunday Times, “Consider the Public.” Here
he diagnosed and rebuked the bad new playwrights, who were:
[B]igoted and stupid to believe that tramps and prostitutes . . . are
automatically the salt of the earth [or] that reasonably educated people who
behave with restraint in emotional crises are necessarily “clipped,” “arid,”
“bloodless,” and “unreal.”
Coward also lambasted the bad new actors who use a pretentious and
unreliable “Method” to justify an inflated sense of their own “intellects” as well
as a contempt for audiences, actors of the older generation, and the theatre itself,
expressed mainly through coprophiliac stage business, slovenly dress, and dirty
fingernails; and above all, the bad new critics, whose “old-fashioned class
consciousness and inverted snobbism” (the Leftist as the true reactionary!) leads
them to assume that any successful West End play is “automatically inferior” to
a shoestring production in the East End, and who mislead the actors and writers
by over-praising anything that “happens to coincide with the racial, political and
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social prejudices of a handful of journalists.”
Against all this Coward praised simple, unpretentious craft—“You must have
the emotion to know it, then you must learn how to use the emotion without
suffering it”—which he had honed the hard way entertaining troops; “Noël
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distrusted every emotion on stage and dealt solely in the illusion.” And above
all, respect for theatrical tradition, and the audience itself, without which there
would be no theatre at all.
The critics sneered, but as usual the public applauded Coward’s common
sense, and the Times’ letters column had to be cut short.
Sadly, not much would have to be rewritten for publication in, say, The New
Criterion; today actors like De Niro and Theron undergo grotesque physical
metamorphoses for roles (satirized in the recent Tropic Thunder by Robert
Downey’s character who preps for a role “by working in a Beijing textile factory
for eight months”), writers seek only to shock and disgust their passive
audiences, and critics impose a rigid, class-conscious code of political
correctness and crap-Freudianism.
And there was bad politics as well; here comes that “reactionary” stuff, though
confined to his Diaries:
The British Empire was a great and wonderful social, economic, and even
spiritual experience and all the parlour pinks and eager, ill-informed
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intellectuals cannot convince me to the contrary.
Bad actors and bad critics were one thing he could “rise above,” to use his
characteristic expression, but not the parlor pinks. The tax-happy welfare state
drove him out of his native land; at a professional ebb and subjected to scorn for
leaving, Coward typically replied: “An Englishman is the highest example of a
human being who is a free man. As an Englishman I have a right to live where I
like.” That turned out to be Jamaica, where he was indeed able to “conserve,” as
the Reader puts it, a little bit of the old England. By 1963 he had concluded that
“the England we knew and loved was betrayed at Munich, revived for one short
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year in 1940 and was supreme in adversity, and now no longer exists.”
The next year, with the Beatles, the ’60s began in earnest. As Philip Larkin
put it in “Annus Mirabilis”: “Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-
three/(which was rather late for me)—/Between the end of the Chatterley
ban/And the Beatles’ first LP.”
In “Swinging London,” along with a new freedom of expression in the theatre,
there was a perhaps surprising Coward renaissance. Coward now began to
openly discuss homosexuality; first, in a one act play, A Song at Twilight, where
letters revealing a homosexual affair threaten an elderly, knighted writer living in
Switzerland (where Coward now lived, but still without the knighthood). Here
the homosexual angle anchors a fairly conventional melodrama, based on Max
Beerbohm but with a bit of Maugham tossed in. Certainly “today’s youth” is not
courted:
Sir Hugo: I detest the young of today. They are grubby, undisciplined and
ill-mannered. They also make too much noise.
But there were also hints of a libertarianism that Coward would soon present
explicitly:
Carlotta: To outside observers my way may seem stupid and garish and,
later on perhaps, even grotesque. But the opinion of outside observers has
never troubled me unduly. I am really only accountable to myself.
Or simply:
But he chose verse, always the home of “his secret heart,” to once and for all
address the question of the homosexual and society; or rather, typically, the
homosexual and his everyday family.
While Britain’s Wolfenden Report, a decade before Stonewall, may have
brought the issue to society’s attention and thus on Coward’s agenda, for Coward
the ’60s promised not the chance to overthrow or otherwise remake society in
some utopian formula for absolute “freedom” (the “freedom” of those grubby,
undisciplined, ill-mannered, and noisy youths, actors, and critics) but rather a
chance for good old English common sense (always to be distinguished from
media-programmed proles) to be heard from on such issues as homosexuality.
In the title piece of Not Yet the Dodo, common sense is expressed by the
family maid to her employer, a mother of conventional middle-class morals who
has finally realized her son is a theatrical homosexual:
Here Coward had the opportunity, towards the end of a long, professionally
successful but, the Left ideologues would imagine, privately thwarted and
persecuted life (nursing perhaps a grudge at the knighthood that would be denied
him until the last moment in 1970), to pen an explosion of rage and expose
society’s rottenness, like the “kitchen sink” dramatists he had deplored (but,
typically, personally befriended) in the ’50s. Instead, Coward delivered a paean
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to the common sense, live-and-let-live conservatism of his working-class roots.
As he wrote in his diary at the time: “I have always distrusted too much
education and intellectualism. Always dead wrong about things that really
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matter.”
This is one of the passages where Real locates his fundamental conservatism:
[It] lies, I think, in the manner in which these acts are presented. In every
instance, such nonconforming behavior is shown to be individualized; true,
it is the individual’s right, but it is also his or her responsibility. In other
words, the problem—if there is one—is the individual’s, not society’s.
Coward may seem to endorse a “new morality,” but he also implies that
personal morality is ultimately just that, personal. . . .
In summary, therefore, it might be said that Coward’s attitude was one of
maximum toleration of independence and non-conformity for the
responsible individual. However, on larger societal issues of order,
patriotism in times of crisis, tradition, national loyalty, skepticism about
man’s perfectibility, and the inherent flaws of human nature, he was
consistently conservative. Because of these views and his accompanying
total trust in the intelligence of many average men, he qualifies, perhaps as
much as any literary figure of our time, for that appellation Russell Kirk so
frequently invokes, the Bohemian Tory.
One might find this redolent of the kind of vulgar libertarianism that is
anathema to many conservatives, including Kirk. Rather, I suggest it has its
analogues in an almost Nietzschean recognition of different moralities for
different people (without his anti-social bias), or rather, for those who can make
themselves different people, and thus be worthy of their own morality.
It may also suggest the Absolute Individual of Baron Evola (and who was
more of a “Bohemian Tory” than the Baron, at least in his younger, Dadaist days,
or when he toured Soviet Russia in white tie and tails to annoy the commissars?)
or the four castes and differentiated ethics of Traditional India (and it is
interesting that other than Guénon, the only Traditionalist who actually lived in a
traditional society was Alain Daniélou, who roamed pre-war India with his lover
in a silver motor home and reports that it was being a European that made him
outcaste, and as a result his sexuality was of no interest to anyone).
The editors of the earlier anthology, The Cream of Noël Coward, were correct
to include Not Yet the Dodo as “a fitting capstone” to the book and his life’s
work, “because it celebrates the people and the country which Coward knew so
well and the values which he always stood for: loyalty, courage, and good
manners.”
“Never waste a good crisis . . . Don’t waste it when it can have a very
positive impact on climate change and energy security.”
—Hillary Clinton, 2009
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After my recent discussion of “manspreading,” in which I deplored the
knee-jerk of the man-o-sphere (“Womens be talkin’ too much!”) and contrasted
the true politeness, the noblesse oblige of the Aryan Male, I have been led to
some more abstract and more generally applicable reflections.
Now, the whole point of politeness is to spare the feelings of the other person.
I recall, for example, hearing this tale many years ago:
Although entitled “A True Story,” this appears to be an urban myth; the role of
the African chieftain has also been taken by South African Paul Kruger on his
first visit to England in 1877, while more recently Nelson Mandela has been
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inserted, with Victoria, of course, updated to Elizabeth. All of which only
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underscores its archetypal wisdom: this is how people with class act.
Now, when it comes to those who do not seem to immediately or obviously fit
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into our social norms, what has traditionally been expected in polite societies
—as supposed to the stereotypical “You ain’t from around here, ain’t yah, boy?”
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situations —is some level of, ah, “accommodation.” The word is still used in
such contexts—“special accommodations” for religious holidays, etc.—but it’s
become something of an anachronism, if not a sick joke.
As it said on a poster popular in the ’60s,
Supposedly, this is the “Gestalt Prayer” authored by that fat, hairy, disgusting
slob Fritz Perls, no doubt composed while—and useful for—seducing naïve
shiksas in his hot tub. But the joke on the poster was the picture, and attribution,
to Adolf Hitler.
This was more appropriate than the poster designers could know. For you see,
the goal is no longer, and hasn’t been for quite a while, to simply accommodate
the Other—to not insist the Jew sing along with your Christmas carols—but
rather to re-cut society’s cloth to fit the Other’s shape—only government
approved nondenominational holiday jingles allowed.
As Greg Johnson has observed, when told that “Merry Christmas” is
“insulting” to Jews,
Bruce Jenner’s sex change, however, was everything but personal. It was an
orchestrated media event, blown-up to proportions so large that it has been
turned into a grand ritual, a staged ceremony meant to push an agenda.
And what might that be? The Citizen is quick to take us away from the lower
depths of the media—the videodrome—and rises to the heights of metaphysics:
The fall of the True Man from the Primordial State is the result of a
decentering, a change in consciousness to exteriority from interiority. Now
the Primordial State is the Androgyne of the Alchemists, that is, the perfect
balance of the male and female principles. From the center, he is the
unmoved mover, and his actions are wei wu wei, or non-acting activity.
We, of course, have frequently made use of the Traditional doctrines of the
True Man, the unmoved but all moving Chakravartin, the Tree at the Center the
Garden. But what possible use are these doctrines to the man in the street? The
answer is, none, or rather, only the negative effect of turbulence and confusion—
the result of throwing pearls before swine, as the New Testament warns; as
Cologero says:
We see that the shift from the ordinary state to the Primordial State
represents, spiritually, a transition from a passive, yin, or feminine state of
existence to a more active, yang, or masculine state. This is the opposite of
the “macho” man, obsessed with frenetic activity for its own sake and
focused solely on material life. Yet, when esoteric teachings enter into the
popular domain, they are completely misunderstood by those at the hylic
and psychic level. When such types hear of the Androgyne, they can only
envision a feminization of man, that is, a[n] exterior type of man taking on
more effeminate characteristics. Thus the epicene man of today, common in
the West, regards himself ipso facto as an advanced spiritual being.
Unfortunately, this occludes the true spiritual nature of man and
discourages many more masculine men from developing themselves in that
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direction.
And that is the use these doctrines have for the media-powered elite: to sow
confusion among the masses, while also vulgarizing and debasing spiritual
symbols.
On the latter point, we can see the effect on the lumpenright and the man-o-
sphere—the negro brute will continue to be their only safe ideal. They will be
completely dumbfounded and given to clueless mockery as Evola himself extolls
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the Androgyne (in The Hermetic Tradition ), where the goal is not to
emasculate the male, still less to create some crude physical amalgam of the
sexes (another example of materialistic science aping metaphysical principles)
but for the male to submit to the female and then, and in order to, overcome the
female and reaffirm the male in turn at a higher level: the so-called “alchemical
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resurrection” or “philosophical incest.”
In another place—the essay “Serpentine Wisdom” (i.e., Taoism)—after
describing the Man of Tao who “‘acts without acting” as Cologero says, Evola
already dismisses these current year Men of Game with some preemptive
mockery of his own:
But all this is not a proper activity for the masses; as Evola says when
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discussing Nietzsche in the first part of Ride the Tiger, one must be worthy of
such freedom, else one destroys oneself in futility, as the masses do with their
endless pursuit of pleasures and distractions. Nor is it even the media-elite’s
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intention that the masses should try to become free individuals; far from it.
As the Citizen says:
Now, you don’t have to go all the way with the Vigilant Citizen’s idea of an
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“occult war” being fought against society through media indoctrination, to see
that something is going on here. Non-conspiratorially, it may simply be that the
liberal mind has a vector to “social” causes and “social” solutions—hence, for
example, the refusal to consider genetics to explain black pathology, preferring
to fall back on the search for increasingly subtle and attenuated forms of racism
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such as “white privilege” or “structural racism.” A truly degenerating research
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project, but when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a perfectly
lacquered nail.
There’s a reason you’re not supposed to use the Devil’s name. No sooner does
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Counter-Currents publish a review dealing with the Great Purge-Meister
Buckley than the MSM, including outlets like Salon that are happy to publish
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outright defenses of pedophilia, was shocked, just shocked, to discover some
interviews in which Milo made some comments about pedophilia which, when
stripped of their obvious intent to offend, reduce to these anodyne propositions:
Now, in the first he is merely agreeing with the British Parliament (he is a
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Brit) and the majority of American states, while the second is a subjective
report, which if true is interesting and if false is delusional. Understandably,
though, people don’t relish stories of pedophilia with a happy ending.
What struck me about the dust-up was that, having recently begun to
reacquaint myself with the New Testament, it seemed a perfect opportunity to
explore what conservatives are always claiming they care about: what would
Jesus do?
Because, unlike the necessarily ad hoc and arbitrary results of an attempt to
obtain contemporary advice from an ancient book of fairy tales, here we have a
pretty clear incident to go on.
I refer to the incident of the Centurion and his Servant. In Matthew, we read:
When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for
help. “Lord,” he said, “my servant lies at home paralyzed, suffering
terribly.” Jesus said to him, “Shall I come and heal him?” The centurion
replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just
say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under
authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that
one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”
When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him,
“Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. I
say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take
their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of
heaven. But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the
darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Then Jesus
said to the centurion, “Go! Let it be done just as you believed it would.”
And his servant was healed at that moment. (Matthew 8:5-13, NIV)
When Jesus had finished saying all this to the people who were listening, he
entered Capernaum. There a centurion’s servant, whom his master valued
highly, was sick and about to die. The centurion heard of Jesus and sent
some elders of the Jews to him, asking him to come and heal his servant.
When they came to Jesus, they pleaded earnestly with him, “This man
deserves to have you do this, because he loves our nation and has built our
synagogue.” So Jesus went with them. He was not far from the house when
the centurion sent friends to say to him: “Lord, don’t trouble yourself, for I
do not deserve to have you come under my roof. That is why I did not even
consider myself worthy to come to you. But say the word, and my servant
will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under
me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I
say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” When Jesus heard this, he was
amazed at him, and turning to the crowd following him, he said, “I tell you,
I have not found such great faith even in (((Our Greatest Ally))).” Then the
men who had been sent returned to the house and found the servant well.
(Luke 7:1-10, NIV)
At the time, pais, a term of endearment, could mean one of five things:
“son or boy”
a “special servant” who lorded over other servants and cared for his
master’s children
a particular type of servant—one who was “his master’s male lover”
an endearing term for the junior partner in a homosexual relationship
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an attractive young male
I think you see where this is going. Although there are tamer connotations,
James Neil has pointed out that it would seem odd for a Roman centurion, the
very model of a Tough Guy, to be so concerned about a mere slave (remember
all those bad connotations of slavery, right?) as to seek out a Jewish miracle
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worker to cure him.
So, here we have Jesus confronted with a pagan, a bloodthirsty soldier, a
Roman oppressor, and quite likely (as they so often seem to go together) a
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practitioner of pederasty.
What does Jesus do?
It would be useful to contrast this with the Woman Caught in Adultery. We
often hear it said, more or less disingenuously, that one must “love the sinner but
hate the sin.” Thus, Jesus tells the woman’s would-be punishers that the one
throwing the first stone must be without sin. As they slink away, Jesus tells the
woman “Go, and sin no more.” He’s pretty clear: adultery is a sin, and she is a
sinner; going forward, she must sin no more.
With the centurion, however, Jesus’ attitude might be called sovereign
indifference. There is not a word about the sin or sinner, if such they be. Instead,
Jesus marvels at the faith held by the man. Throughout the New Testament, Jesus
is stymied by Jews who are uncomprehending or hostile; even his own disciples
betray him (Judas), deny him (Peter), and doubt him (Thomas). And yet here is a
Roman, a goy, who gets it!
Jesus is not the Jewish Messiah, come to overthrow the Romans and establish
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the Pax Judaica. As Max Stirner says, he is not interested in revolution, but
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insurrection; not external change, but change that at least starts from within.
He associates with gluttons, drinkers, tax collectors, and whores, much to the
disgust of the (literal) Pharisees. The physician (like Luke himself) must go
where the sick are to be found; what matters is that they have the faith with
which anything is possible.
And so the centurion’s words become the faithful’s formula of contrition: the
priest and the congregation together respond to the invitation to “Behold the
Lamb of God” with these words: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter
under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.”
My moral being that Milo is someone who gets it. What’s “it”? They hate us,
and want us to die, and we will, if we don’t stop Them.
Rather than virtue signaling and morally panicking at the slightest lifting of an
eyebrow by Those who are themselves hardly paragons on the subject (indeed,
“first stone,” MSM?) but are certainly mortal enemies of our side, we should in
such circumstances rather be “as wise as serpents.” Let us make common cause
with those who share the faith. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
After all, if They do take over, the children will hardly be any safer, right?
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Of course, as with all Biblical exegesis, your mileage may differ. Since we
started with the opening of Pulp Fiction, perhaps it would be best to let Jules
have the last word, as he usually does; here he is, at the end, after his own
conversion experience:
Now . . . I been sayin’ that shit for years. And if you ever heard it, that
meant your ass. You’d be dead right now. I never gave much thought to
what it meant. . . . But I saw some shit this mornin’ made me think twice.
See, now I’m thinking: maybe it means you’re the evil man. And I’m the
righteous man. And Mr. 9mm here . . . he’s the shepherd protecting my
righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could mean you’re the
righteous man and I’m the shepherd and it’s the world that’s evil and
selfish. And I’d like that. But that shit ain’t the truth. The truth is you’re the
weak. And I’m the tyranny of evil men. But I’m tryin’, Ringo. I’m tryin’
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real hard to be the shepherd.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
February 28, 2017
WILD BOYS VS.
“HARD MEN”
I.
ARE WE MIDDLE CLASS CONSERVATIVES?
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At The Occidental Observer, Elizabeth Whitcombe in “The Difficult Class”
lauds the supposed “strength” of the middle class, epitomized by its supposed
“individualism,” and laments how global elites have tried to undermine it. Of
course, one might question how “individualist” the middle class is, or whether, if
so, that is a strength. Kevin MacDonald, for one, argues that the alien elites (you
know who They are) are precisely promoting individualism itself to undermine
White societies.
Whitcombe, however, has an odd idea of “individualism” since she thinks
that, “In his Republic Plato recognized the power of middle class principles.
Family loyalty, community participation, self-reliance, and prizing education are
all things that help the individual resist the will of the State. Plato knew that a
class of virtuous citizens needed these qualities in order to prevent the state from
slipping into tyranny.”
I’m not sure any of this is particularly “individualist” or “middle class” as
opposed to archaic Greek warrior virtue, promoted by pederasty and represented
in public art by statutes of invincible male friends who resisted tyranny to the
death, but whatever; at least she seems to admit that Plato must be pretty smart,
since she wants to draft him for her cause.
Alas, our trust is misplaced; apparently, Plato is an untrustworthy ally, and
reveals himself as . . . wait for it . . . “naïve”: “Plato naïvely thought that he
could get rid of internecine conflict by extending the family relationship across
an entire class—in other words, communal property and no nuclear family.”
Somebody is “naïve” here, but I don’t think it is Plato. Rather, Plato is quite
aware of what he is about. In this “class” of Guardians, he is attempting to
recreate the features, and thus the benefits, of a Männerbund, the male warrior
groups that split away from exactly the “nuclear family” Whitcombe naïvely
eulogizes, in order to create the higher institutions of the state and culture.
Ironically, many of the institutions that one thinks of as “middle class,” such
as the Boy Scouts, the Little League, the Armed Forces, and the Church, etc., are
in fact vestiges of such bands; that’s why women are obsessed with “gaining
entrance” or, like Ms. Whitcombe, naïvely ignoring them and promoting the
female cults of Family Values. That’s also why they are subject to Christian-
inspired witch hunts for “homos.” (Why there, rather than in banks or hardware
stores?)
At one time, Rightists from Hans Blüher to Julius Evola knew of such things,
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but today it’s all about Judaic Family Values.
These are the Wild Boys that William S. Burroughs mythologized, which I
have taken as my blog’s emblem; indeed, Burroughs’ mythology will crop up
again in our examination of the next offending article.
II.
KURTAGIĆ’S “HARD MEN”
The very next day at TOO, Alex Kurtagić contributed “They Don’t Make
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Them Like They Used To.” Here Alex treats us to a visit to a local exhibition,
where photographs of some Olde Tyme factory workers (a pencil factory, if you
will) produce an odd effect on our correspondent. Whitcombe’s middle class
likely leaves him cold, but these filthy old codgers set his mind athinking in odd,
unwholesome ways. He calls the Wife over and she concurs; these chaps, with
their “hostile frowns, ice-cold blue eyes, and troglodytic beards and angrily
scowling moustaches” are Real Men, and are sadly lacking today. In another
article, Kurtagić pays tribute to the industrious Quakers, who played a prominent
role in creating the kinds of factories that produced pencils, matches, and “Hard
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Men.”
Right off, I have some questions here. For all their beards and stares, these are
after all pencil factory workers, not coal miners. Secondly, would these Hard
Men be spending their precious “free time” gazing nostalgically at old
photographs, and even if so, would the Wife be along? It seems to me that when
Men were Men, Women were Wives, and stayed home mending and birthing and
boiling tripe.
Unhindered by such negativity, Kurtagić continues to drift in his vaguely
erotic reverie about the days when factory labor made men Hard, and even
waxes nostalgic for the “muscular Christianity” and the Cult of Work that served
as ideological cover for the mechanized enslavement of the English yeomanry.
Orwell already made similar observations on the degeneracy of British
manhood in The Road to Wigan Pier, but formed a rather different, and more
plausible, diagnosis. Observing the sorry specimens arrayed under a dreary sky
for the funeral of King George (the only color supplied by the pink bald heads
revealed when hats were doffed), he lays it first to the sacrifice of the physical
best of a generation in the Great War, and thus the loss of their progeny; and
moreover, the appalling conditions (filth, hard work, poor nutrition,
overcrowding) of the Industrial Revolution that Kurtagić lauds!
The futile evil of WWI, and the evils of the factory system: more evidence
that Orwell and Waugh were, as a recent dual biography argues, The Same Man?
Certainly he’s more of a “conservative” here than Kurtagić.
III.
TRADITIONALISM VERSUS CAPITALISM
Is this what the Right has become? Eulogizing Victorian factory slavery and
the twisted troglodytes it produced? At one time, English Traditionalists saw
these men as “a ruined race” (Tolkien), and thundered against the system that
produced it. That Christianity produced and defended it is hardly a positive
feature of the religion, as Kurtagić thinks, and most English Traditionalists who
stayed Christian (Chesterton, Belloc, Gill, Eliot, etc.) fobbed it off on the
Protestant deviation.
The medieval Church, steeped in Aristotle, was part of a continuous Western
tradition, going back to the Greeks, which condemned work and promoted
leisure as “The Basis of Culture,” in the words of Thomist philosopher Josef
Pieper, whose Leisure: The Basis of Culture, was a surprise bestseller in the
1950s when T. S. Eliot prompted his publisher Faber & Faber to put it
out. Imagine, a Catholic bestseller!
Non-English, non-Christian Traditionalists such as René Guénon and Julius
Evola were even more scathing. And why not? Modern “work” is the satanic
parody of traditional craft, which, before it was destroyed by Protestant “work,”
was an integral part of traditional society, each vocation appropriate to elicit the
perfection of the laborer’s own nature (hence, caste) as well as to serve as a
“support” for metaphysical and initiatory knowledge. The factory system, by
contrast, treated “all men as ‘equal’” and interchangeable units to be worked at
the stupidest tasks until the last ounce of strength was gone, and then tossed on
the scrap heap.
Evola devoted two chapters of his post-war manifesto, Men Among the Ruins,
to “the demonic nature of the economy” and its tin idol, work. As Troy
Southgate summarizes it in his book Tradition and Revolution:
The emergence of capitalism has often been equated with the Protestant
work ethic, and is here dismissed by Evola for the simple reason that labor
has been transformed from a means of subsistence to an end in itself. It is
not only the Right who are obsessed with work, of course, it is the Left too.
One thinks of endless marches organized by the likes of Militant Labour
and the Socialist Workers Party, during which the only objective is to
enslave the proletariat to the employment system: “The most peculiar thing
is that this superstitious and insolent cult of work is proclaimed in an era in
which the irreversible and relentless mechanization eliminates from the
main varieties of work whatever in them still had a character of quality, art,
and the spontaneous unfoldment of a vocation, turning it into something
inanimate and devoid of even an immanent meaning.” Evola sees this
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process as the very proletarianization of life itself.
But what is all this to Kurtagić? Who cares for waxing airy-fairy about medieval
crafts and vocations? Protestantism and Capitalism (the original “PC”?)
produced these deracinated pencil-making Hard Men. Chesterton, Eliot, Guénon,
Evola; not a beard among them! Nothing to tickle his fancy here!
IV.
THE WILDE WILDE WEST
Many Rightists are surprised to learn that Evola admired the works of Oscar
Wilde, at least in his youth, but it’s not hard to see why. Evola despised
Whitcombe’s bourgeoisie, and Wilde was their great tormentor. And Wilde’s
social thought, as epitomized in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” was part
of the same “work should ennoble or not be done at all” tradition that would
later be mined by such Traditionalists as Ananda Coomaraswamy and Guénon as
well as Evola himself.
As someone once said about Ayn Rand’s idealized portraits of industrialists,
“she writes about industrialists as if she had never met one,” so with Kurtagić
and his Hard Men, whom he only knows from photographs; one can only
imagine what he would think of Wilde’s idea that work must be abolished
because it is ugly and makes men ugly.
Interestingly, Wilde, unlike Kurtagić, actually met with miners, along with
cowboys and other Hard Men of the West during his famous American tour. A
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fascinating article by Jan Wellington gives an account of the remarkable
encounters, where “Wilde both advertised and embodied the aesthetic movement
with its scorn for middle-class Victorian life and the uglier effects of the
Industrial Revolution,” a perfect summary of what Evola hated, while also
summarizing what Whitcombe and Kurtagić want to preserve in the name of the
Right.
Since Kurtagić extends his admiration to “the frontiersmen of American Old
West,” let’s see what happened when The Aesthete met The Hard Men.
From the time Wilde disembarked in New York, Americans were surprised
to observe that, despite his elegant hands and languid gestures, the Aesthete
was a strapping young man who, offstage, ate and drank with gusto and
spoke with genial frankness. They learned that even his oft-ridiculed stage
dress of black velvet jacket, lace cravat, silk knee breeches, and patent
leather pumps could be understood in terms of pragmatics. As Wilde
explained, “When a man is going to walk or row, or perform feats which
require a display of strength and muscle, the trousers are done away with
and knee breeches are worn.”
The Hard Men or Wild Boys of the West were not bowed down under the twin
curses of work and muscular Christianity that Kurtagić wants to press down on
our brows. Indeed:
This, of course, is the West that served William Burroughs as the basis for his
Dead Roads trilogy. These Wild Westerners sound like they could just as well be
called the Mötley Crüe or the Guns N’ Roses Gang.
Indeed, one aspect of that free Hard Man culture that Kurtagić, and his
Victorians, might have found hard to swallow: the men took Leif Garrett (a
relation to Pat Garrett?) as their model, not Thomas Arnold:
In truth, Wilde’s long tresses and outsized hats were not all that eccentric,
for Americans had come to associate long hair on men with boldness and
adventure. In the West, long hair distinguished masculine men like Wild
Bill Hickok, George Armstrong Custer, and Buffalo Bill Cody. . . . The
Denver Republican declared approvingly “that if placed in a mining camp
dance hall, [the Aesthete] would pass for a real bold, bad man.”
Wellington notes that the Hard Men placed value on three things, and they
were not high in the value system Kurtagić promotes: fighting, drinking, and
cards. This allows us to get an idea of how Wilde would score on the Hard Man
meter (I suggest we designate the units as Kurtagićs, or Ks).
Fighting? Wilde? Sure, he was huge man in real life, although later some
described him as resembling a “fat, white slug.” The lecture tour did not give
any opportunities for fisticuffs, although he did make “a promising impression”:
a reporter noted that he “stumbled onto the stage with a stride more becoming a
giant backwoodsman than an aesthete.”
Drinking? “In San Francisco, he foiled an attempt by the Bohemian Club to
ply him with liquor and prove him a ‘Nancy boy’; after out-drinking (and out-
talking) them all, he was given a proud place in a group photograph of the club.”
Cards? “In the same city, he thwarted another attempt on his manhood by
professing his ignorance of poker, bluffing bafflement, and then beating all
challengers at the game.”
In short, “when I lit a long cigar,” he reports, “they cheered till the silver fell
in dust from the roof . . . and when I quaffed a cocktail without flinching, they
unanimously pronounced me in their grand simple way a bully boy with no glass
eye—artless and spontaneous praise which touched me more than the pompous
panegyrics of literary critics ever did or could.”
As for the miners’ own opinions, the Leadville miners “cheered as Wilde
drove a silver spike into the lode that would bear his name. Years after his visit,
they recalled their guest with affection, one reportedly declaring, ‘[t]hat Oscar
Wilde is some art guy, but he can drink any of us under the table and afterwards
carry us home two at a time.’”
Driving a spike? That’s some real work there, Alex; I doubt your beloved
pencil factory workers would find that an easy task. Twenty years making the
same tiny motions with your hands is likely to leave you with a mean, suspicious
visage, but isn’t really good for developing the biceps. No wonder they wore
long pants; breeches would have revealed their pitiful shins!
What was the basis of this evident kinship of Oscar Wilde, the dandy and
aesthete, with these Wild Boys of the Wild West? Simple: no matter how hard
they may have worked, they did not allow their souls to be subjected to
bourgeois economic necessity. Instead, their lives were dedicated to ideals and
actions that transcended economic necessity: aesthetic appreciation and display,
games and contests, chivalrous behavior, the unfettered imagination—in short,
the wellsprings of real culture. The West is where the freest spirits in America
escaped from the creeping blight of factories and tenements—until they hit the
West coast, and modernity finally caught up with and consumed them in the end.
V.
BUNNY ROGER
Speaking of hard men and revealing outfits, consider one final example of the
Homo as Hard Man: Bunny Roger. Reading Nicky Haslam’s memoir, Redeeming
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Features, I was delighted to find out about this actual gun-toting Wild Boy,
Bunny Roger, described by Clive Fisher as “Erstwhile couturier, wit, dandy,
landowner, and social ornament, Bunny Roger was what obituary in its obliquer
days styled a lifelong bachelor and what gossip columnists knew as a flamboyant
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homosexual.”
But what interests us right now is Bunny’s military career, and the
Traditionalist character behind it. As Haslam says, “His legendary parties, his
houses, his dandified approach and outré taste were but a soufflé. They masked
an encyclopedic mind, a sense of history, nerves of steel, passionate loyalty, deep
patriotism, and the most patrician of values.”
Not only was Bunny a standing rebuke to post-Stonewall, Leftist, “gay,”
“queer,” “adversary,” “transgressive” nonsense, his service in WWII should put
paid to any nonsense about “gays in the military”; not because of some Leftist
whining about “we wanna be equal” (and so hypocritical, given the Left’s
pacifism and anti-Americanism), but precisely because, as the pagan world has
known since Plato, homosexuals (or rather, as Ean Frick suggests, masculinists)
are better soldiers, naturally:
Bunny himself was made of burnished metal. Physically very fit—I saw
him run up mountains in Scotland, at the summit adjusting his makeup from
a compact kept in his sporran—he was also fearless. As a captain in the
Italian campaign, even if his tent was lined in mauve with gilt chairs, and
his army overcoats altered to look like Garbo’s redingotes, he was revered
by his men for the number of Germans he shot—“some right up the arse”—
and after the war even refused ever to set foot in Germany.
Bunny, apparently, could give the Bear Jew a run for his money. Here’s more
of Bunny’s War:
The greatest generation indeed. Of course, now the American army is fully
Judaized, doing “God’s work” in the Near East with no homos. How’s that
working out for you, boys?
Kurtagić’s beloved beaten-down proles, or Bunny Rogers, leading a battalion
of Wandervogel: Which is the face of our White Future?
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
September 20, 2012
FASHION TIPS FOR THE
FAR-FROM-FABULOUS RIGHT
Patsy: [nervous on TV] You can never have enough hats, gloves, and shoes.
Edina: Darling, even Amanda de Cadenet would remember the word
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“accessories.”
I.
THE NOT-SO FABULOUS RIGHT
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The Right can make even Patsy Stone seem like Karl Lagerfeld.
Alex Kurtagić, despite his miserablist glorification of pencil-workers, at least
sees the problem. In several essays at various “New Right” websites, he’s
observed, all too truly, that the Right is losing, has lost, the “cultural war” not
because the Left has better arguments, but because no one wants to be seen with
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us.
What has happened over the last 50 years or so has been the systematic
removable of status—basically, chicks and money—from White cultural
expressions, ranging from rebellious rockers in spandex pants to authors
speaking correct English, which are one and all systematically denigrated as
“white” and—therefore— “gay.”
As Antonio Gramsci told us long ago, in the contemporary words of Pierre
Krebs, “To be precise, it is impossible to overthrow a political apparatus without
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previously having gained control of cultural power.”
Or, as the protagonist of Bright Lights, Big City says, as he wistfully gazes at a
Talmud-reading Hasid on a New York subway:
II.
THINK RIGHT, DRESS WHITE
Men always seem to need advice on how to dress, but it’s usually funny,
though sometimes creepy, when “conservatives” start bloviating about how to
dress like “real men.”
Feet, for some reason, always seem to come up (as it were). Yeah, I get it, the
dirty hippies got all the hot chicks in the ’60s, right, Mr. Boomer Conservative?
Jealous, much? I remember years ago reading, in something like American
Spectator or some “conservative” columnist, someone, a P. J. O’Rourke
wannabe or himself, going on and on about a man wearing sandals at some town
meeting. He kept referring to such people as “foot fetishists,” but it occurred to
me then, and still does, that the fetishist is the one so upset that he writes a
column about it filled with references to feet, not the man wearing the sandals
without a second thought; just as men are the fetishists, not the women wearing
leather or stilettos.
And so, at the appropriately named TakiMag:
9. COVER YOUR MAN TOES The first thing I always say about mandals
is, “What if someone slaps your girl and you have to chase them?”
Nobody’s saying you have to be Randy “Macho Man” Savage and pile-
drive everyone who doesn’t open the door for your lady, but flip-flops
render you incapable of physical combat. Shit, I don’t even think mandals
should be allowed on the beach. Wear your sneakers to the beach. When
you get to your towel, you can leave them there before swimming or, if the
sand is hot, wear them to the tide’s edge and leave them there. Men are
wearing flip-flops to work, parent-teacher interviews, apartment closings,
and the dentist. Wearing mandals reveals a level of shameless self-love that
reminds me of a baby playing with his penis while he gets his diaper
changed. I barely want to look at a woman’s hideous black toenail polish on
the filthy city streets. Seeing your mangled foot-claws flip and flop through
dog crap is like forcing us to watch you masturbate.
Here is the fundamental point behind all these rules: A grown man is
meant to be prepared for conflict and provide for his wife and family.
Indulging oneself like a gay teen on vacation is not only abandoning your
post, it’s leaving women to pick up the slack. And nobody wants a world
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like that—especially women.
Indeed. But if one were to dress “honestly and naturally out of the life we lead
and prefer to lead,” then what would be more honest and natural than the bare-
chested, shrunk skintight, wild-haired working class teens of the MC5’s White
Panther Party? Or their spandex-clad musical idols?
No, TakiMag prefers our White Youth to emulate the hangdog faces of the
latest round up of redneck “militias” infiltrated or instigated by the FBI.
That’s the “conservative” movement, for yah. No metrosexuals, no homo, just
a bunch of pasty, overweight patsies. You know, “Real Americans.”
III.
STEVE SAILER’S FEAR OF SPANDEX
IV.
THE DANCE CLUB AS WHITE AUTONOMOUS ZONE
Or a meeting of the Latin Mass Society attired in the spirit of the “Night of a
1000 Stevies”:
Fringed shawls, velvet hooded cloaks, baby’s breath with ribbons, ruched
boot covers, Victorian coke spoons, tambourines, best hair in rock and roll,
seventies gypsy, pre-Raphaelite, handkerchief hems, Lindsey Buckingham
drag, Edwardian bustiers, leather and lace.
Although classically, suits and ties were also forbidden (except on women) if
Jackie were still around “Mad Man Realness” would no doubt be given its own
night.
Which is not even to say there were no Negroes at all; a handful were to be
found, even on the event staff, but these were of the advanced, Michael
Jackson’s Queer Eye152 sort, rather than the Michael Jordan, or Michael
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Thomas, sort.
See, it’s not at all about “skin color,” as the straw-man-making Liberal would
have it. At Jackie 60 you were not judged by the color of your skin, but by the
contents of your closet.
THIS OLD GAY HOUSE
Will Fellows
A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture
Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
“Ever wonder who was the first guy to put pineapple on pizza? I bet he was
gay. No straight guy is gonna say: ‘You know what this pizza could use? A
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pineapple ring!’ But God bless ’im, it’s good!”
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet. . . .
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
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America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
There are arguments along the lines of ‘no children, so they don’t have to
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live in safe neighborhoods with good schools,’ or ‘no children so they
have more income’. And even an argument that I heard that gay men are
marginal creatures in the culture, or have been historically, and so they are
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inclined to take on marginal enterprises like preservation.
Making things a bit more concrete, these “themes” are explicated as a “cluster of
concerns” such as:
Creating and keeping attractive and safe dwelling spaces; restoring and
preserving wholeness and design integrity; valuing heritage and identity;
nurturing community relationships; fostering continuity in the midst of
incessant change.
In short, the basic values of the New Right. In fact, Fellows later provides a
quote from Jung (the Aryan Freud) which is very interesting in this context:
Even further, Fellows insists historic preservation is far from “marginal work”
fit only for people on the sidelines of “real work,” but is “a job that is at the very
center of their society’s life, akin to religious work.” As he explains elsewhere:
There’s this whole phenomenon growing out of the human soul that
resonates more powerfully for some people than for others that has to do
with identifying things that are in need, things that are broken, things that
are not whole, not complete, and restoring them to a state of wholeness. So
in a certain sense I do see historic preservation as a religious act, religious
in the original meaning of that word, having to do with putting back
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together something that is broken.
We’ll return to those religious dimensions, but first, let’s go back to those
“themes,” which are not entirely self-explanatory. Domophilia is a “neologism”
and rather unfortunate, as it sounds like a sexual aberration. In fact, it’s nothing
scarier than “an exceptional love of houses and things homey, this deep
domesticity, which often emerges in childhood.”
Romanticism is not a neologism but is also unfortunate, being so polyvalent.
Fellows calls it “romanticism with a small r, the exceptionally romantic and
emotional ways in which many gay men relate to the past, to old buildings and
the places, and to the lives and possessions of their previous occupants.” In
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short, what New Rightists will recognize as what we call “hauntology.”
Rightists might also think of H. P. Lovecraft as a non-homosexual, but
distinctly odd, example of this trait—“I am Providence” and all that—but
Fellows throws us a wonderful curveball here; Lovecraft is never mentioned in
the book at all, but Romanticism is immediately exemplified by August Derleth,
Lovecraft’s executor and posthumous collaborator, who set up Arkham House
(note the name!) to preserve Lovecraft’s weird oeuvre. Lovecraftians, led by S.
T. Joshi, have long given Derleth a hard time, but here he’s lauded for his
“quintessentially queer romanticism” as exemplified in such novels as The
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Atmosphere of Houses.
By contrast, Aestheticism is fairly straightforward, having for a long time
“served as a code word for gay.” It refers to “the emergence in childhood of [an]
artistic eye and aptitude, [an] extraordinary visual understanding of the world,
[a] design-mindedness.” In short, to refer to the cable metaphor again, a “queer
eye.”
Connection- and Continuity-mindedness is perhaps the most self-explanatory,
but it’s also the most ironic, since it presents gay men as more conservative than
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most so-called “conservatives.” Fellows delineates them thus:
Fellows then quotes the marvelously named James Van Trump, who seems to
be a closet Heideggerian or archeofuturist: “We live in a kind of cultural
continuum, like a chain . . . We need a constant going back and forth from the
present to the past. We have to have the past from which to move on.”
The bulk of Fellows’ book is both a history of historical preservation and an
oral history of the gay men involved in it—to the extent that one can separate the
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two. Some men are well known in their professions, some are not. Some
places are obvious—Provincetown, New Orleans—others are outliers—Red
Cloud, Nebraska, or Cooksville, Wisconsin. As you can tell from the quotes I’ve
sprinkled here and there, they’re a fascinating group, well worth your time to
visit.
After all this Fellows has to face up to the meta-issue: how come? Here
Fellows is boldly un-PC, driven by the data, anecdotal though it may be:
“‘Artistic,’ ‘musical,’ ‘nervous,’ ‘sensitive,’ ‘sophisticated,’ and ‘temperamental’
have served as euphemism or code words for gay. They are all based in the
reality of gay men’s lives.” Score one for the Sailerites—some stereotypes are
based on reality! In this case, “based on the reality of gay men’s lives.”
Fellows comes down on the un-politically popular side of nature, not nurture;
quoting interviewee Richard Jost: “[The numbers of men involved in historic
preservation] ‘would seem to argue for the existence of a preservation gene,
which I would guess is located very near the Broadway show-tune gene.’”
But no sooner does Fellows take his stand on empirical reality than he moves,
even more boldly, from cliché to “archetypal truth,” bringing in the big guns:
Camille Paglia herself: “Gay men are aliens, cursed and gifted, the shamans of
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our time . . . caught midway between the male and female brains.”
Shamans! Male and female brains! In more traditional societies, from the
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shamans of so-called “primitive” tribes to the monks of mediaeval
Christendom, these men who “partake of the ambiguous virtue of the feminine,”
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as Evola says, have largely been drawn to perform religious functions.
In the last two hundred years, however, the speed of change has accelerated to
such an extent that preservation of the built environment has itself taken on the
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trappings of a religious calling. Indeed, clergy took a leading role in the
beginnings of the preservationist movement.
As Fellows quotes another wonderfully named-interviewee, Richard Wagner,
a Wisconsin preservationist, “It’s a priestly role, in the sense of the shamans.”
If all this talk of “brokenness” and healing and religion—shamans, even!—
seems a bit much, consider some evidence from those interested in preservation
as such. For example, New York’s official real estate curmudgeon, “Jerimiah” (a
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pseudonym ), gathers some evidence of his own in a rare moment of meta-
reflection on his task:
You can like those towers or hate those towers. But here’s the thing: All the
glass boxes around the city are making us sick—mentally and physically.
They are literally killing us as they hasten our deaths.
Change, for its own sake, isn’t necessarily a good thing. In New York,
“change” means eradication. There is no effort to blend the new with, and
into, the old. It’s all or nothing, no compromise, no desire in preserving the
past in the present to be appreciated in the future. It’s funny that Europeans
understand that preserving the past, in historical and cultural contexts, is a
way of maintaining a continuous link between what came before, what is
now and what will be in the future. Warsaw, Dresden and Nurnberg for
example, were obliterated during WWII. They were rebuilt, combining old
and new (which included painstakingly recreating historic structures)
because the people understood the importance of being able to connect with
their past. Unfortunately, preserving and acknowledging New York’s
history doesn’t exist in the minds and actions of developers. A dystopian
city, à la “Blade Runner” is something we all should fear since that seems
to be the direction New York is heading.
Fellows even finds himself drifting further into the vortex of Traditionalism,
quoting from John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s The Necessity for Ruins to the effect
that the preservationist “sees history not as a continuity but as a dramatic
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discontinuity, a kind of cosmic drama,” involving a necessary plunge into
chaos and decay (as in the nigredo stage of alchemy?) before the work of
restoration can return us to “that golden age of harmonious beginnings.”
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This is how we reproduce the cosmic scheme and correct history. Are we
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perhaps trying to reenact some ancient myth of birth, death and redemption?
Gosh, could the “conservatives” be wrong? Perhaps all those childless men do
have some role to play in reproduction and survival, at least in the reproduction
of the past into the future and the survival of cities, not global consumerist
playgrounds?
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I suspect that at this point Fellows’ readers in the architecture or “gay
studies” shelves may have started to bleed from the ears as he hits these levels.
Nevertheless, it is a rare and valuable empirical supplement to the more abstract
works alluded to above (as well as some of my own) that strive to remind us of
role of the non-family man in the creation and preservation of Aryan culture.
“These ladies were so much of the place and the place so much of
themselves that from the first of their being revealed to me I felt that
nothing else at Brookbridge much mattered. They were what, for me, at any
rate, Brookbridge had most to give: I mean in the way of what it was
naturally strongest in, the thing we called in New York the New England
expression, the air of Puritanism reclaimed and refined.”
—Henry James, “‘Europe’”
What passes for “the Right” in America, having first been seduced by
apologists for Capital like Ayn Rand and William F. Buckley, then subjected to a
coup d’état by the neo-con junta, is in no position to support, approve, or even
understand the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. The Bourbons may have, as
Talleyrand supposedly said, learned nothing and forgotten nothing, but the
gleaming, streamlined Neo-Right (not to be confused with the European or
North American New Right) has forgotten everything the Right used to stand
for, and “leaned” one thing—“Lower tax rates solve everything!”—which isn’t
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even true.
Fight Wall Street? What sense is there in that, when the “official” conservative
talking heads are all employees of Murdoch or GE, and think, and look, more
like Patrick Bateman than George Bailey. As Oliver Stone realized to his horror,
he gave Gordon Gekko a speech that could have come from the pen of William
Jennings Bryan, to say nothing of William Pierce:
The richest one percent of this country owns half our country’s wealth, five
trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes
from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot
sons, and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It’s bullshit. You got
ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I
create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace,
famine, upheaval, the price per paperclip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat
while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now
you’re not naïve enough to think we’re living in a democracy, are you
buddy? It’s the free market. And you’re a part of it.
And people’s reaction was “Fuck yeah! Where do I git onea them MBAs?”
One theme from the dull contempt with which the Official Right greeted OWS
that struck me as more true than either side may realize was something like this,
which you’ve heard versions of time after time:
This isn’t a serious political movement worth our notice. It’s just a bunch of
sociology majors who can’t get jobs and want the whole world to be like
college again.
There’s something to this, but probably not what O’Reilly’s viewers think is
there. First, though, let’s back up a bit.
For a while I was merrily documenting each of Jim Kunstler’s weekly tirades
against the White People on his eponymous Peak-Everything blog,
www.kunstler.com, as evidence of the White-hate that simmers just beneath the
“thin veneer” (as his co-ethnic, Freud, would say) of criticism of our gas-
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guzzling society, which is often the true motive behind all this “green”
blather. However, it just got too boring, the same predictable rant, even the same
stomach-churning metaphors—pus, bacteria, rancid lard—for the White Plague,
the same “just wait for it” as the price of oil rose only to then fall as life went on,
until finally I called it quits.
So it’s good to see Edmund Connelly taking up the torch. His whole article is
important reading, but the quote from Jim is worth reproducing here, as it
contains a very excusable mistake, worthy of further consideration.
In his recent blog “Our Turn?,” he begins with a familiar Jewish obsession:
Readers of Kunstler’s blogs will know of his fear and contempt for
Americans who do not live in big cities and who are not reflexively liberal
in their politics. These are the infamous “cornporn Nazis” [sic] of
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Kunstler’s nightmares.
The first thing one notices, of course, is the typical Judaic myopia: history is
all about Jim’s little tribe, and it’s the story of the innocent Jews being constantly
oppressed and murdered by the goyim, who can’t possibly have any reasons to
hate Jews, and so must be completely insane. And indeed, who but the crazed
could possibly want to harm God’s Little Pets?
Since the Judaics, from Freud, or perhaps Moses Mendelssohn, up to the latest
po-mo clown, are always boasting about how their “outsider status” allows them
a privileged objectivity about the general culture, you’d think then that they’d
acknowledge being a little bit of an interested party in this matter. One might
think “sociopathic political program” might refer to the Bolshevik revolution,
inspired by the Judaic Marx and implemented and sustained by Russian Judaic
terrorists, sustained for over 70 years, and involving the imprisonment or murder
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of tens of millions; how’s that for “carnage and devastation”?
Some might suggest the original “mad nation” was France in 1789. To some
other “outsiders,” the “psychotic break” might be better known to them as the
European Revolution of 1933. What could be crazier than that last attempt by the
“best educated” of Europe to “break” the power of Finance Capital? Kinda
sounds like “Occupy Wall Street,” now, don’t it?
But for now I want to focus on the small but interesting factual error: Jim is no
fan of the big cities. Of course, it’s easy to make that assumption, even apart
from his liberal-Judaic background. He hates the Suburbs, as the epitome of our
Easy Motoring Culture of cheap oil and plastic, and jobs for rednecks above
their proper station, and of course he hates the Rural areas, being a Judaic and all
—as Israel Shahak pointed out, Judaism is the only culture that has never
idealized the worker of the land, from Greek pastoralism to the Prussian Junkers,
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British “country life,” and the Jeffersonian yeoman —but he loathes the
energy-wasting, gentrifying Cities almost as much.
Jim, as you can see, is a very hard man to please.
See, Jim has his own version of the country squire going on, up in the Capital
District, although his contempt for the proles makes him incapable of the gently
amused appreciation Bill Kauffman—“The Sage of Batavia” as Gore Vidal calls
him—brings to the same area. Still, Jim is very much the “country gentleman” in
his own way, or rather, a way that hasn’t been noticed very much—hence
Connelly’s natural error—and to which I want to pay some attention here, in the
context of Occupy Wall Street.
I even have a name for it: the Neo-Rural Liberal.
Ever notice that despite their contempt for rednecks and Babbitts, the liberal
prefers to live in a small town or village? Martha’s Vineyard, Fire Island,
Hampton Bays, you get the picture? Hell, even the Big City Liberal lives in a
village, whether historically rooted (Greenwich Village) or just a realtor’s
marketing ploy (The East Village). Berkeley itself is just a village compared to
San Francisco (where evil Bankers and the maids live).
Obviously, liberals prefer to live with other liberals; we all prefer to live with
our own kind. One only needs to point this out because liberals themselves
vociferously deny it they have any such atavistic tendencies, and deny the
privilege to Other Whites, who get forced busing and integration, and a sneer if
they still contrive (as most do, even now) to escape to those terrible Auto
Suburbs or NASCAR Towns that the Jims hate so much.
Those that didn’t grow up among Their Own soon acquire the taste when they
go away (and they have to, to Get Away from Them) to college. The “college
town” is the classic example of a small town filled for some reason with flaming
liberals; in fact, most of them will never be as liberal as they are now, as they act
out against parents, teachers, society, “townies,” etc.
Even the aforementioned big cities have their college towns: Columbia is
located on the Upper West Side—the White part, of course, that George Carlin’s
teen gang preferred to call “White Harlem”—NYU in the Village.
This was the crystallization point of the film, The Big Chill. The eponymous
chill is the cold world outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of the mighty U. of
M. That was the last (perhaps only) time any of them were content, or even
settled, if that doesn’t seem too paradoxical a way to describe the transitory
student life; now, working and living in horrifying cities (even then, before the
“Black Undertow” of the last three decades) like Detroit, Atlanta, New York, and
Hollywood, their lives suck.
The only reasonably grounded one lives in small town South Carolina, but
he’s betrayed his “radical” past and become a “businessman.” His guilt is
assuaged only by playing unwilling host to his college buds, and fathering a
child on one of them, at his wife’s suggestion. No small town prudes here!
He does have a big old Victorian house, though, so that when they all meet up
for the funeral of one of their number, they decide to bag the cities for the
weekend and try to re-create their student lives in one of those old Victorian
student houses on Ann Arbor’s Liberty Street (perhaps a few doors up from that
quaint little bookstore you may have heard of, name of “Borders,” which
recently enacted its own cycle of boom and bust).
“You know, I live here. This place means something to me. I’m dug in.” Of
course, the University of Michigan sweatshirt he wears while making that “I’ll
take my stand” speech betrays Kevin Kline’s self-delusion; he has a house full of
college buddies watching the Michigan-Michigan State game (how’s that for
college town overkill?), and the only advantage to South Carolina, apart from
cheap labor to exploit, is that as a Local Businessman, the cops don’t crack his
skull for smoking marijuana.
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Like all Disingenuous White Liberals, Motown may be “the only music in
this house” but only because that’s what they listened to at U. of M. (the Evil
Husband who goes home to see to the kids, of course, lives in Detroit, not Ann
Arbor).
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Another early adumbration of the meme is found in Paul Fussell’s Class.
It’s pretty accurate and amusing (such as his take on the reasons for the
popularity of the Preppy Handbook, and the dreaded “one size fits all Proles”
tractor hat), but Fussell just can’t accept the idea that what OWS calls “the one
percent” is out of his reach as well; “they have no interest in ideas” he sour-
grapes (his ideas, of course), but then he reveals that some (the smart ones, of
course) can drop out of the whole class system. These free spirits he dubs “Class
X.”
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In a devastating review in The Atlantic, authentic Top Class chronicler
Wilfred Sheed pointed out that the Class X-ers seemed to be a recognizable type:
tenure track academics like Fussell himself, who “never talk about the food or
wine being served” not because of superior taste, as Fussell thinks, but because
years of cafeteria food and jug wine “have given them palates of stone.”
These are the dreary, know-it-all inhabitants of CollegeTown USA, with their
Fair Trade coffee (priced out of prole reach) and solar collectors that take 10
years to “pay for themselves” (not really an option for people living on payday
loans).
Of course, in itself, small town life is a natural taste. After all, small towns
always score high on those “Best Place to Live” surveys. A whole cable channel,
Hallmark, is devoted to hazily filmed fairy tales about big-city career women
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who find the secret to happiness when their car breaks down in Hooterville.
It’s the flip side to the Lifetime channel, where the women are beaten, raped, and
killed by their over-achieving big-city boyfriends. Problem is, small towns are
full of White Others, who are not only non-Jewish, but even conservative. As
Wallace Shawn, the WASP Woody Allen would say: Inconceivable!
Those not lucky enough to relocate to one of the Urban Villages or College
Towns will work like demons at banking or law or “writing,” and hopefully
make enough money, mostly by ripping off the infra-dig real Main Street, to
move to some liberal-restricted “Main Street” inhabited by tame, amusing
Vermont eccentric types and which “just happens” to exclude the Others due to
lack of ready cash: the appeal of the Hamptons, Vineyard, etc.
Since Fire Island has no actual industry or economy, the vacationing Upper
gets the thrill of everything he buys being a twice-as-expensive “import.”
Meanwhile, the handful of natives needed to run the cash registers and bus the
tables lives in trailers and flee to the mainland after Columbus Day.
The Others also includes the black chappies, of course, other than a couple of
IQ outliers like P. Diddy or Henry Gates, who serve as ready exhibits to show
that we’re not racists, like those awful Other Whites across town; no “Jim Crow”
laws needed, or nasty old “traditions” or irrational “customs,” just the
insurmountable barriers of money and education. What could be more fair, as
the liberal understands the word?
Even Jim Kunstler fits the picture. I’ve lived around there, and you’ve got to
have some kind of money to live a decent life in a hell-hole like the Capital
District. But if you do, life can be sweet; hell, if there is anything around it’s
cheap, and you mail order the rest, or have it delivered from the city, or custom
built; even the carpenters, as Fussell already observed, are likely to be fellow Ivy
grads. Money buys the private conveniences, and also the cars and air tickets
that Jim uses as he circles the globe, decrying the carbon footprints of the
rednecks and other Bigfoots.
Hey, the richest guys in America live in Omaha, NE and Redmond, WA.
So, after destroying the Cities with their idiotic laws and racial nonsense, the
Liberal now yearns for the palmy days of ice cream socials and bandstands in the
park (“Next stop Willoughby!”), recreated, Disney-like, in areas from which the
twin wrecking balls of liberalism and finance capital have driven the Other
Whites, leaving the Liberals, like the lucky ones in Blade Runner, to “live the
Good Life” in what we might call the “super-Urban” colonies.
Despite all his smug superiority over “urban planners,” Kunstler’s vision isn’t
that much different than Robert Moses’. Unlike Jane Jacobs, he has no
appreciation for true diversity as manifested in the Big City, and although he
wouldn’t endorse Moses’ techniques of political and literal bulldozing, he’d be
quite happy living with his think-alike liberal peers in a devastated urban hulk,
where the White Ethnics have been driven out from lack of jobs, but the Darkies
are kept at bay by high rents.
This became clear to me over the last year or so, as, during an extended period
of unemployment, I became hooked on the three-episode weekly marathon
repeats of The Gilmore Girls, a show I had known only from occasional jokes
and parodies during its initial run (2000–2007). Nothing I had ever heard about it
had led me to consider watching it then, nor did it give me any reason to
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reconsider now.
Needless to say, the show is loathsome on its own terms, but I began to find it
utterly fascinating as a window onto the Liberal Mind and its Sense of Place.
Almost a decade of reviews, blogs, and forums has already established a
Minority Opinion, among even Liberals, that the unintended irony of the show is
that Lorelei Gilmore, rebellious child of privilege, is presented to us as
supremely beautiful, intelligent, witty, and above all heroic in her struggle
against her wealthy, scheming, manipulative parents, while in fact being
intensely annoying, self-destructive, deluded, almost autistically self-involved in
dealing with those she condescends to notice, and, above all, both spoiled and
ungrateful to her long-suffering parents (the father, played by echt-WASP and
hometown boy Edward Herrmann, was the hook that got me watching in the first
place).
What particularly struck me, however, and is of relevance here, is the creation
of Stars Hollow, the small town that Lorelei ran away to as a pregnant,
unmarried teenager and where she has raised her daughter (also named Lorelei,
or Rory for convenience—see what I mean about egotism?) over the last sixteen
years, and who is also, as her namesake, supremely beautiful, intelligent, witty,
but—having benefited from being raised by Lorelei and not her evil parents—is
able to attend Yale and have rich boyfriends without getting knocked up.
Stars Hollow is in the television tradition of small backwaters populated by
dimwitted but good-hearted folk that the main character can play against. Andy
Griffith’s Mayberry, North Carolina is probably the classic example. Stars
Hollow is unlike Mayberry, however, not just in being in the Northeast but also
by being as much a college town as one could have without an actual college; for
the convenience of seven years of story arcs, it seems to be located in spitting
distance of an elite girls school and Yale, and within easy commuting distance of
the ritzy Connecticut suburbs (for weekly parental dinners, leading to the Airing
of Grievances—yes, Lauren Graham was one of Seinfeld’s ladies of the week—
fueled by vast quantities of Pop’s gin) and New York City (for job interviews
with the New York Times right out of school, and perhaps to occupy Wall Street
without missing Mom’s home cooking).
Most significantly, Stars Hollow is brimming with small town traditions and
ways that are the subject of local pride and care, but which Lorelei, despite
living there almost two decades, feigns ignorance of and whose evident stupidity
or outright craziness she greets with her biting “wit” and corrosive “irony” to the
amusement of steadily declining TV audiences.
The town of Stars Hollow is a simulacrum, to use a word beloved by Liberals
of a theoretical bent, of a small New England town but one inhabited by a multi-
culti elite (well, one Korean family and a black guy who is, of course, not just
hyper-competent but also FRENCH) who think like Woody Allen, while the
people who built and inhabit the real Stars Hollows of the world are portrayed, if
townspeople, as stupid but amusing to Lorelei (and us, of course) or else, like
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her parents, monsters of evil.
One thinks of Henry James’s description, for his English audience, of the town
of Concord, Mass., in the time of Hawthorne:
It is very possible that at this period there was not (even) an Irishman in
Concord; the place would have been a village community operating in
excellent conditions. Such a village community was not the least
honourable item in the sum of New England civilisation. Its spreading elms
and plain white houses, its generous summers and ponderous winters, its
immediate background of promiscuous field and forest, would have been
part of the composition. For the rest, there were the selectmen and the
town-meetings, the town-schools and the self-governing spirit, the rigid
morality, the friendly and familiar manners, the perfect competence of the
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little society to manage its affairs itself.
I suppose this must be what Martha’s Vineyard is like: the small rural towns
built by White Protestants, inhabited by Woody Allen clones.
The body snatchers came from the Levant, not outer space, and they’ve taken
over Santa Rita! And if your town is “lucky,” you’re next! Tomorrow the world?
Lurking behind it all, especially the Judaic obsession with the danger of a
recurrence of the German Revolution of 1933, is what we might call the Final
Solution to the Goyim Problem. For, as no less a “genius” than Freud has told us,
an obsession with the sins of others is a cover for one’s own sins. The German
sin was to do to the Judaics as the Judaics would do to us, before the Judaics had
enough power to do so. For centuries, this has been the plan; we’ve seen it what
happens when Judaics take power during the Russian Terror, and Palestine is
only a dress rehearsal, paid for by the goyim themselves, for the Big Show.
As Connelly concludes, the Judaics who still form the template for “real
liberals” are:
a hostile elite that fears and mostly dislikes us—people like Frank Rich,
[James] Howard Kunstler, and thousands of other antsy Jews like them.
What will happen to us if such Jews feel so at risk that they preemptively
seek to neutralize the “threatening” ones among us?
In Homo Americanus, as I’ve noted numerous times, Croatian savant
Tomislav Sunić envisions such a scenario for any group in America that
might be targeted: “Thus, in order for the proper functioning of future
Americanized society, the removal of millions of surplus citizens must
become a social and possibly also an ecological necessity.”
Prior to 1920, the Great Other in American culture was the seducer in the
big city. The innocent young girl from the country would be picked up by
the man with oily, slicked-back hair and pencil thin moustache. Or, an
innocent young man from the country would find himself in the clutches of
a painted lady. Oh, the horrors! This began to change in 1920 because the
census revealed more people were living in the city than the country.
By the 1970s we had the movie Deliverance which showed the dangers
that city folks faced in the rural backwoods. There were inbred mutants
laying in wait, ever ready to cornhole you and maybe even bite your pecker
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off. Oh, the horrors!
How did we get from Gomer Pyle, played by Jim Nabors in CBS “rural
sitcoms,” to “Gomer Pyle” played by Vincent D’Onofrio in Full Metal Jacket?
It’s Connelly’s take on Kunstler that give us the clue: the Judaic dominance of
both the liberal Left and the neo-conned Right.
It’s as if Mayberry were being fought over by two evil real estate interests.
One, the Liberals, want to clean out the locals and replace them with students;
here we find Kunstlerville and Stars Hollow and perhaps Zucotti Park. The other,
the Right, wants to ship the jobs overseas and drive everyone to the trailer parks
outside town, perhaps imprison what’s left, and have Trump build luxury condos
financed by Wall Street.
What unites both is a more or less unspoken view of “those people” not as
The People, salt of the earth—remember when political movements were proud
to call themselves “populist”?—but as basically ignorant and potentially
dangerous rural yahoos, a bunch of anti-Semites who don’t matter anyhow.
No wonder that when Charlie Sheen’s bête noire, Chuck Lorre, was looking
for a way to instantly characterize Charlie’s character’s potential mother-in-law
as far worse than his own mother (a manipulative WASP, of course) he made her
a Midwesterner who announces her arrival by complaining about spending her
flight “sitting next to some big Jew.”
The Wall Street Occupiers are the Gilmore Girls, en masse, hating Big Money
but hating “the people”—you know, the “Tea Party morons”—just as much; the
problem with having such refined standards is that it’s hard to make a revolution
with just a handful of smart-mouthed hipsters as your constituency.
The Occupation-haters share their disdain for the People, though they are
willing to be paid to pose as the People’s Tribunes; they love the Big Money—
the 1%—who pay for their hypocrisy, and since Big Money already calls the
shots, they don’t need no stinking revolution anyway.
In Godforsaken America, the Old Right’s dream of a nation of rooted
communities of farmers and small business has been abandoned for Star Wars
fantasies of high tech and globalization, and only survives now on the Left, in
the distorted form of the Liberal’s dream of College Forever.
It was the future Senator Blutarsky who gave us the epitaph for Occupy Wall
Street many years ago, in a movie—Animal House—that oddly enough seems to
evoke both the preciosity of Stars Hollow real estate and the funky chaos of an
OWS encampment: “Seven years of college down the drain.”
POSTSCRIPT
Readers may be aware that since this was written, the town of Stars Hollow
has morphed into Portlandia, the eponymous setting of the “indie” comedy series
on IFC. Portland is indeed the next turn of the screw, a Stars Hollow where
everyone went to Yale, or at least took some courses in Postmodern
Anthropology or Deconstructing Native American Cuisine at the community
center.
The vibe from the opening credits is what Greg Johnson has identified as the
root of “West Coast White Nationalism”; he notes that Seattle and Portland are
the Whitest cities in America; the states of Washington and Oregon are among
the Whitest as well. Yet they have preserved, from frontier days, a genuine
openness to eccentricity that one doesn’t find in the usual Whitopias.
A sign, apparently official, exhorts “Keep Portland Weird,” but while we see
some crusty old-timers, they seldom if ever show up in the skits; even the
Mayor, played by weird-icon Kyle McLaughlin, runs off to join a reggae band.
No old-timers, no tradition-minded Mayor like Stars Hollow’s Doosie, and
above all, no WASPy adults like Lorelei’s parents. Lacking that critical,
“outsider” perspective (which the Left, and the Jews, supposedly value so
highly), the series never rises to “White Nationalism” but only “Implicit
Whiteness.” The jokes about homicidally aggressive cyclists and restaurants that
offer personal introductions to the animal you will be eating show that, left to its
own devices, political correctness will spiral into forms so obnoxious as to
become fair game for satire even among the cultural Left; but that same lack of
any old-timers or stuffy Establishment figures prevents any sense of an
alternative—White but non-PC—from presenting itself.
If Lorelei and Rory ran a bookstore instead of an inn, they might eventually
resemble the proprietresses of Women and Women First; but without her parents
to politely tut-tut, the series would, like Portlandia, lack any historical context.
That’s why Portlandia is a very funny sketch comedy series, and The Gilmore
Girls is the 21st century equivalent of The Magnificent Ambersons, just like
Welles would have wanted it: in color, and seven years long.
Brian De Palma’s 1987 film, from a script by David Mamet, is usually seen as
a Hero’s Quest film, like Star Wars (or The Final Sacrifice), or at least an Epic of
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some sort, but I find it more interesting to see it as a film that, probably
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unconsciously, delineates the re-creation of the ancient Aryan Männerbund.
Although the study of the Männerbund dates to the 19th century, it was Hans
Blüher who first championed its significance, using it first to analyze the
German youth movement, the Wandervogel, and later as the key to a non-
Freudian, indeed, anti-Freudian, understanding of civilization, especially that of
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the Aryans. Later, Julius Evola would incorporate the idea in his post-war
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writings on the origin and possibilities for the rebirth of the Aryan State.
Today, the foremost exponent of the Männerbund is Wulf Grimsson, who has
devoted several volumes to it, most recently Male Mysteries and the Secret of the
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Männerbund, where he delineates the idea thus:
[I]t is an immense loss to our way of life that this structure has all but
vanished and it may be that such a system of social ties will be the key to
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surviving the many catastrophes which are around the corner.
One such crisis is the decay of everyday legal order, despite an evermore
massively intrusive government, a situation Sam Francis called “anarcho-
tyranny.” Such a situation might be compared, in a limited way, to America,
especially cities like Chicago, under Prohibition. As John Kenneth Muir says:
Importantly, not one of these men (especially Ness) declares any fealty to
the government’s (wrongheaded) policy of Prohibition. On the contrary,
what this foursome defends to the death is the very principle that makes
America great: the rule of law. This is the meat of Ness’s inner crisis: can
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the rule of law be re-established by violating the law?
As Carl Schmitt emphasized, the political is defined by the exception; he is
sovereign who can in an emergency declare an exception to the rule of law—and
get away with it. However much it may offend the delicate sensibilities of the
Liberal, not everything is subject to debate and proper procedure. If it is the law
itself that no longer works, how can it be restored legally? No wonder the Tea
Party’s costumes freak them out.
Indeed, as Evola emphasizes, only the Männerbund can do so, because it is
not only outside the State, as it is outside the family structure, but also prior to it,
being the true origin of the State itself.
BEWARE OF IMITATIONS
Capone: Yes! There is violence in Chicago. But not by me, and not by
anybody who works for me, and I’ll tell you why—because it’s bad for
business.
. . . not just some fine old warrior-aristocrat who has somehow fallen into
the wrong age. Ahab is just such a man as nineteenth-century America was
producing, a man who could and did ruthlessly exploit the land and the
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people for his own grandiose, self-aggrandizing ends.
We next meet his presumed nemesis, Elliot Ness, with his wife and children.
Well, we know that the family unit isn’t going to be the source of a Männerbund.
But when he goes to work, carrying the lunch he wife has made for him, we
learn that the Chicago Police aren’t either. They’ve been corrupted, penetrated,
as it were, by Capone. His first ridiculously earnest raid—“Let’s do some
good!”—is an embarrassing “bust out,” netting him only a shipment of Japanese
parasols, and a nickname in the press: “Poor Butterfly.” (Even the press is on
Capone’s side—during the raid Ness mistakes a reporter for a gangster.)
Ness learns he is not cast as a Hero, this time, but a clown—perhaps Canio in
Pagliacci, a bit of which we see Capone enjoying later in the movie—or even a
forlorn geisha. He started the day as a little boy; he ends it completely
emasculated.
As Jack Donovan says in The Way of Men, while Ness is a “good man,” but
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he’s not so “good at being a man.” Despite his empty boast, he doesn’t know
how to “do some good.” To learn how to be good at being a man, Ness will
obviously need a teacher; but as we have seen, the primary method of initiation
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in the West has been not the teacher as such, but the Männerbund, which also,
conveniently, has been the primary means of establishing, and re-establishing,
the State.
Ness won’t surrender to, and certainly won’t join, Capone; he won’t go along
with the corrupt cops or politicians, or curry favor with the press. To beat them,
he can’t join them; he needs to find another group, or create his own.
“The first and most important feature of groups is the fact that groups are
not constituted according to the wish and choice of their members. Groups
are constituted by the teacher, who selects types which, from the point of
view of his aims, can be useful to one another.”
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—Gurdjieff
Enter the last honest cop, Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery) who will become
the teacher who selects the men who will become known as The Untouchables.
Malone is so honest that he’s never risen above beat cop. It’s not clear why Ness
trusts Malone to be the last honest cop in Chicago. Connery’s bogus “Irish”
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accent alone might set bells off.
As we shall see, however, Connery’s character will indeed manifest a
shamanic ability to shape-shift. One more clue we have that Malone is on the up
and up is that they meet on a bridge.
The sorcerer and warrior are always liminal, while they may enter into the
community their values and allegiances set them apart. Sorcerers, shamans
and witches in most traditions are often pictured as living at the edge of the
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village or in forests or caves.
Malone will eventually agree to teach Ness “the Way,” in this case, “the
Chicago Way,” which is a kind of karma-yoga in which appropriate, or
svadharmic, action is all:
Malone: You wanna get Capone? Here’s how you get him. He pulls a knife,
you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to
the morgue!
Malone starts with the first of many tricks and inversions of society’s norms, in
this case, both inverting Ness’ oath of duty and tricking him into affirming a new
one:
Ness: I have sworn to put this man away with any and all legal means at my
disposal, and I will do so.
Malone: Well, the Lord hates a coward. Do you know what a blood oath is,
Mr. Ness?
Ness: Yes.
Malone: Good. ’Cause you just took one.
At the trial, Ness admits he has “foresworn” himself by eventually being led
to choose to hunt Capone with Capone’s own methods, not the State’s.
Now Malone begins to put together the warrior band. But who can they trust
in the department?
The allusion to the Garden of Eden is clear, although we will see that it is
Malone’s double, Frank Nitti, who embodies reptilian evil.
The . . . leader [of] any Männerbund must take great care when selecting
comrades and develop a preinitiation training program which will weed out
those unsuited or unwilling to commit. Such programs should not only be
intellectual but include “homework” to prove dedication and “challenges”
would-be comrades should overcome. . . . It should be made very clear to
any potential comrades the nature of the commitment, that a Männerbund is
an Androphilic organization and that no outside relationships are
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permitted.
First, though, Ness makes his own demand: no married men, even though, as
Malone quickly points out, Ness is himself married. Ness doesn’t seem to have
quite figured out what will be required of him. When Nitti threatens them with
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the ironic “It’s nice to have a family,” Ness ships them off the countryside.
Thor curses Starkadr telling him that if undertakes Odin’s requests he will
have no children, no individual land or property and be despised by the
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common folk.
Malone rejects with contempt a recruit who recites the police motto, then
insults and strikes another, whose violent but controlled response passes the
tests.
This is the first racial note in the movie. Obviously there are no Blacks on the
force, but the “racial” antagonisms are there nonetheless. Between Ness, Malone
(with Connery’s confusing Irish-Scot accent), and “Stone” (another blurry shape-
shifter) we seem to have an early attempt at what Greg Johnson has suggested:
Ironically, these men are joining together to enforce Prohibition, which was
largely the attempt of small town WASPs (like Ness, whose family is now hiding
out in the countryside) to “control” the “thieving wops” and “stinking Irish pigs”
of the big cities.
Finally, Ness has already been assigned Wallace, a meek little accountant from
Treasury. Physically and professionally, he seems to be the Designated Jew, but
nothing is ever made explicit, and so for our purposes we can treat him as White.
Ness is still living in ignorance, and does not yet appreciate the value of Wallace,
both as man, and as the key to the capture of Capone.
Wallace epitomizes the role of the geek or nerd, as Jack Donovan describes it:
[A] code for its related letter in the Elder Futhark which is Ansuz.
Traditionally Ansuz is related to Odin but reversed is related to the trickster
Loki so the correlation seems correct. The rune also means the Aesir in
general and hence the use of this rune emphasizes that Loki has left the
community of the gods and become a true spiritual outlaw. Ansuz is related
. . . to Venus. In the community Venus or love holds the family together
while in the Männerbund Venus is androphile and focused on individual
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immortality through sorcery.
INITIATION I:
“OUTSIDERING”—“HEY. THIS IS THE POST OFFICE . . .”
“The first rites of Initiation are those which help the comrade consolidate
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his rejection of the functions of the society around him.”
“As shamans and sorcerers they must move beyond the tribe and become
separate from the rules and regulations of the community. Essentially they
become spiritual and social outlaws.”
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—Wulf Grimsson
Malone has shape-shifted into civilian garb, but still uses his beat cop
knowledge to strip the mask off another public institution: behind the façade,
literally, of the Post Office is one of Capone’s warehouses.
This is the turning point in Ness’ career, and the movie, with Morricone’s
soaring theme music underlining it for us. So does the dialog and action, which
pound away at the liminal theme: crossing the street, crossing Capone, crossing
the doorway.
Malone: Everybody knows where the booze is. The problem isn’t finding
it. The problem is who wants to cross Capone. Let’s go.
Ness: You’d better be damn sure, Malone.
Malone: If you walk through this door, you’re walking into a world of
trouble. There’s no turning back. Do you understand?
Ness: Yes, I do.
Malone: Good. Give me that axe.
The axe, of course, is a traditional symbol of male power, as well as the root
of the fasces symbol.
After making his violent and uninvited entrance, Malone is confronted by a
portly thug, or postal worker—once more, ambiguity—who demands his
“rights.”
Portly Thug: Hey! This isn’t right! Hey! This is no good! You got a
warrant?
Malone: Sure! Here’s my warrant. [Delivers the stock of his shotgun to the
thug’s crotch]
Malone: How do you think he feels now? Better . . . or worse?
Malone delivers butt to crotch, the warrior band’s deviant inversion of sodomy,
making quite clear that they have gone beyond concern for rights, warrants, and
the social good.
Here is the scene, seen, as it were, through Grimsson’s lens:
When I look at the tale I see an initiatory rite, a ritual whereby Loki is
becoming a sorcerer. He is ceremonially rejecting his role among the Gods
and the tribe [the cops] and becoming a spiritual outlaw. It begins as Loki is
refused entry to the feast. This is unusual as Loki as a member of the Aesir
would have been invited to such an event even if he sometimes behaves
erratically [Malone as a cop would ordinarily be “in on” the crimes, but he
is the one honest cop, whose goody-goody ways are joked about].
He then kills Fimafeng, the name Fimafeng means service [the Postal
Service?] and he represents the normal activities of a community such as
serving, working and feasting. By Loki killing Fimafeng he is making it
clear he is going beyond his prior role within the Aesir and within the
society.
He enters the hall but Bragi says he is unwelcome. Bragi is the god of
poetry and the storyteller of the community [The Post Office?].
Loki’s insults are staged and meant to symbolise him separating from
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each of the Gods and their functions.
INITIATION II:
THE WORLD TREE—“MANY THINGS ARE HALF THE BATTLE”
“As the initiate moved through the bund other rites were used including the
initiation of the world tree which was a form of northern vision quest
giving the initiate an experience of the power of the runes. I believe that the
Männerbund was also secretly devoted to Loki as Odin’s blood brother and
darker rites were used in his honour. These rites included those of shape
changing and the techniques of the Berserker.”
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—Wulf Grimsson
Ness has sworn a blood oath, joined a Männerbund, and crossed the threshold.
Now he and the others face further initiations to acquire further powers—shape-
shifting, reading the runes, and the fighting skills of the Berserker.
After the successful raid, Ness decides to take the battle to Capone, heading
North in an airplane—at time when such flights were rare among ordinary folk,
though a common achievement for the shaman—to the Canadian border where a
shipment of whisky (from Joe Seagram to Joe Kennedy, perhaps) is scheduled to
be exchanged for cash on a bridge.
Not just a bridge but a border; obviously we are meant to understand this is
another, more intense, liminal situation.
Mountie: Thus taking them by surprise from the rear. And surprise, as you
very well know, Mr. Ness, is half the battle.
Ness: Surprise is half the battle. Many things are half the battle. Losing is
half the battle. Let’s think about what is all the battle.
The Mounties riding in is a film and cultural icon. Here, however, they seem
to have forgotten their motto, “We always get our man” and become symbols of
careful, bureaucratic procedure, like Canada itself. They are another false
Männerbund, mere agents of the State. They’re not corrupt, like the Chicago
cops, but they’re not helpful either. Their pudgy “captain” (as Ness mistakenly
calls him, as if he were a cop) hands out safe and complacent orders (attack from
the rear, for surprise), settling for a safe second best, which Ness rejects with
some quiet contempt, preferring to be instructed by his guru:
“Many things” indeed happen in this complex scene, and most of them, I
suggest, involve either the acquisition or demonstration of shamanic powers.
This suffering was part of a birth, death and rebirth motif but without the
role of the biological female, the male is reborn through the agency of men
alone and hence becomes part of a new “family” structure which is of a
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single sex.
The bureaucratic Mounties’ safe and secret strategy goes awry, creating chaos
(from behind, au rebours indeed) in which the men are tested.
This condition also creates a unique psychological state for the warrior
preparing him for Berserker training, if he is already undead and eternally
in Odin’s service then pain and death are minor transitionary stages and
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nothing to be feared.
Stone is the first and as yet only one of the Untouchables to be shot, thus
pierced, but quickly jumps back up; he is either invulnerable, a trickster, or
already dead and hence fearless.
The candidate is first given a basic education in ethics and the teachings of
the lore. He then withdraws from the community and fasts and undertakes
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ascetic activities including being pierced with a spear.
Stone, however, is down long enough to literally infuriate the meek Wallace,
who acquires the spirit of the Berserker; shrieking in rage, he rushes the
gangsters like Achilles avenging Patroclus, killing several and, when out of
shells, resorts to what is now the signature Untouchables method, using the butt
of the shotgun to dispatch the last thug.
Ness escapes being run over by diving under the car, a symbolic death, and
then, trailing a gangster back to their cabin, himself kills his first man.
Finally, Malone, the Trickster, will use the dead man to fool the captured
bookkeeper into agreeing to decode the account books. Only he and Ness know
the man on the porch is the one Ness killed earlier; Malone goes outside, picks
him up, holds him against the window, pretends to threaten him, sticks his gun in
the corpse’s mouth, and blows out the back of his head. The Canadian is
horrified by all this violence.
Finding the code has been their ultimate goal, not just stopping a shipment of
whiskey. In other words, interpreting the runes. The corpse, pushed up against
the window and pinned their by Malone’s pistol, may suggest Odin’s self-
hanging to acquire the knowledge of the runes.
And we can also go back to a bit of comic relief, when Wallace, after his
Berserk outburst, and to solidify his Outlaw status, helps himself to some of the
booze leaking from the truck. The use of socially forbidden intoxicants is a well-
known Shamanic, and Tantric, technique; one also may recall Siegfried who
drinks the blood of the slain dragon and acquires understanding of the language
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of the birds.
SACRIFICES
Capone: And if you were a man, you would’ve done it now! You don’t got a
thing, you punk!
Since none of the “real” Untouchables was killed, it’s hard to see why De
Palma kills off half of them. Wallace’s death is particularly unmotivated; in the
language of Internet movie discussions, they all seem to have the Stupid Ball at
this point—ironic, since Wallace is presumably the smart guy. It may be just
cinematic: create conflict, pare down the cast to focus on Ness, etc. Or what?
The Untouchables has been a fairly “PG” film up to this point: no ears cut off,
no gangsters being carved up in trunks, no exploding heads, the obsession with
which Scorsese seems to be satirizing at the end of The Departed (which also
involves a main character killed in an elevator by a rogue cop). Starting with
Malone’s shooting the corpse in Canada, blood starts to flow; in Malone’s case,
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ridiculous amounts, as befitting the importance of his character.
The only sense I can make out of them is that both deaths are sacrifices, part
of some kind of ritual. Wallace, having already made his point about Capone’s
tax liabilities, is expendable. Malone’s death seems to be some kind of payback
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or “boomerang” from the etheric realm for his corpse shooting stunt.
Thus we don’t have to rack it up to stupidity. When Nitti fools Malone with
the decoy killer (few people who quote it remember that Malone’s “Just like a
wop, bringing a knife to a gunfight” line is followed by his being cut apart by a
machine gun) it’s psychic payback for the corpse stunt. Malone, like the corpse,
is already dead anyway (“It’s a dead man talking to me” said the corrupt cop
earlier), and as Grimsson emphasizes, the whole point of being initiated into the
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warrior band is to be already dead, hence able to fight fearlessly.
If Nitti is Malone’s twin, then he seems to play the role of Loki to Malone’s
Wotan, in accordance with Grimsson’s suggestion that the Männerbünde were
led by Wotan but had more secret rites associated with Loki. Nitti’s gender-
ambiguity, sudden or subliminal appearances around crimes, and above all his
fooling Malone with the decoy assassin (cleverly inverting Malone’s gun vs.
knife with shotgun vs. tommy gun) suggest Loki’s shape-shifting, while his
Loki-like boasting about Malone’s death will lead to his own demise, and Ness’s
triumph.
Malone’s death, then, is a self-sacrifice, and just as Wotan’s sacrifice leads to
knowledge of the runes, both of these deaths are related to communication in
some way, an appropriate role for the dead.
Nitti has hung Wallace’s body in the elevator, suggesting one of the odd ways
Loki would “assist” Wotan, and used his blood to smear the message
“touchable” on the elevator wall, reminding Ness of his mortality. Malone,
despite losing about 90% of his blood, is still able to gasp out the train
information, but more importantly, he inspires Ness; first, when Ness discovers
him and Malone asks, “What are you prepared to do?” and later, when Nitti
makes the mistake of mocking his ridiculously bloody death, leading us to see
just where Ness in fact is prepared to go. Like Obi-Wan, Malone is even able to
inspire Ness after what we would call “death.”
The Train Station sequence, while the final bravura set piece, is really quite
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dispensable. De Palma added it to Mamet’s script, perhaps to show Ness is
still capable of defending “family values” despite his increasingly outlaw
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status, or to reinforce our memory of the child’s death at the beginning, as
well as the threats to Ness’ family; or just as an homage to Eisenstein.
Nitti: I said that your friend died screaming like a stuck Irish pig. Now you
think about that while I beat the rap. [Nitti is now doubling Stone, who
called Malone “a stinking Irish pig.”]
Which causes Ness to revert to full Berserker mode, frog-marching Nitti right off
the roof, and shape-shifting him into Malone:
As he falls, Nitti not only shrieks like a little girl, he flaps his arms wildly, as
if trying to transform into a white bird against the bright blue sky (or blue
screen), but his shamanic powers to fly or shape-shift have been misplaced along
with his wisdom.
It’s conceivable that Malone’s death was an elaborate scheme to not only lead
Ness to Nitti but insure he would be enraged enough to kill him outright. As
Grimsson has pointed out, the member of Odin’s band, the initiate, is already
dead, and so does not fear death.
From the alchemical thriller, Red Dragon:
Dr. Frederick Chilton: You caught him. What was your trick?
Will Graham: I let him kill me.
Now Ness has to finish with Capone. Knowing about the bribed jurors, Ness
the Trickster bluffs the judge into thinking Ness knows his name is in Capone’s
coded ledger, and the judge responds by executing the largest shape-shifting yet:
Judge: Bailiff, I want you to go next door to Judge Hawton’s court, where
they’ve just begun hearing a divorce action. I want you to bring that jury in
here, and take this jury to his court. Bailiff, are those instructions clear?
Bailiff: [puzzled] Yes, sir, they’re . . . clear . . .
Capone: [to his attorney] What’s he talking about? What is it?
Judge: Bailiff, I want you to switch the juries.
Bailiff: Yes sir.
Defense Attorney: Your honor, I object!
Judge: Overruled!
Remember, Capone is in a civil court, for tax evasion, not murder, but now he
will face a family court jury, since in the film’s terms he is guilty of the child’s
death at the beginning, whose mother asked Ness for justice.
Capone’s attorney reacts by switching his plea to guilty (unlike the jury
switching, not really a possible defense motion at this point, but whatever; this is
a philosophical fiction), and, as the cliché has it, the courtroom “explodes.”
Ness has achieved his shamanic purpose: he and his androphilic band has
inverted reality, ripping the façade off society, and even turned back time. We are
back at the beginning of the movie. The elite courtroom of false justice explodes,
not the bar full of honest working people. Frank Nitti has exploded into a pile of
bloody flesh in the back of a car, not the little girl who found his bomb in the bar.
Capone, who we first met telling us that there was no violence in Chicago, at
least “not by me,” is now swinging punches wildly, like a common juvenile
delinquent.
In the aftermath, Ness is cleaning out his office and finds Malone’s call box
key, with its religious medal, St. Jude, patron saint of police and lost causes
(“God, I’m with a heathen” Malone had said when having to explain it to Ness).
Ness gives it to Stone: “He’d wanted a cop to have it.” Apparently, while Ness is
moving on, back with his family (choosing The Path of the Ancestors), Stone
will remain.
Here we uncover a final Männerbund: the Twelve Disciples (there were
eleven Untouchables in reality, the twelve minus Judas). Stone, born Giuseppe
Petri, has received the key(s), and upon this rock a new, uncorrupt police force
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and cleansed society will be built, safe for Ness and his family to return.
We’ve learned that the Männerbund is not an archaic, literally primitive
feature of Aryan culture in a dead past, as the Christians and secular
“Progressives” would have us believe (conveniently for them) but an eternal
principle, which can always and anywhere be re-accessed and re-created when
needed. As Krishna said, in a verse frequently quoted by Savitri Devi:
MALONE’S DEATH
In the magical, dry, or solar way, you will create a duality in your being not
in an unconscious and passive manner (as the mystic does), but consciously
and willingly; you will shift directly on the higher part and identify yourself
with that superior and subsistent principle, whereas the mystic tends to
identify with his lower part, in a relationship of need and of abandonment.
Slowly but gradually, you will strengthen this “other” (which is yourself)
and create for it a supremacy, until it knows how to dominate all the powers
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of the natural part and master them totally.
Then, “the entire being, ready and compliant, reaffirms itself, digests and lets
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itself be digested, leaving nothing behind.”
In short, as the New Agers like to say, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill
him.
If Malone is a projection of Ness, embodying what Ness knows about being a
man, but manifested as an external being able to function as a teacher and then
dismissed (like Tyler Durden in Fight Club), this would not only be consistent
with the shape-shifting and other shamanic attributes of Malone, but also explain
most of the oddities I called attention to. How do they just happen to meet on a
bridge at Ness’s point of greatest need? If, as Malone himself says, the whole
police force is corrupt, why does Ness trust Malone himself?
And above all, why does Malone, an Irish cop, speak in a quasi-Scottish
brogue? Because Ness, the ur-Norwegian Midwesterner, has probably never
heard a real Irishman; Ness has just arrived in Chicago; talkies were only
recently invented; even Cagney’s The Public Enemy won’t be released until after
he leaves in 1931.
Speaking of Kevin Costner playing dead, I also failed to point out that Costner
made his big screen debut playing a corpse. This was in The Big Chill, where the
opening credits play over a body being dressed for viewing. According to the
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commentary track by the writer-director, Lawrence Kasdan, Costner was to
portray Alex, the erstwhile leader of the gang back at the U. of M. whose suicide
brings them back together for the funeral. These flashbacks were the first scenes
shot—the whole film was made in chronological order for effect—but Kasdan
decided to scrap them and only deal with present time. As a sop, Costner was
given the unaccredited role of Alex’s corpse.
Kasdan’ commentary goes on to state that audiences were supposed to be
fooled, thinking that a woman was dressing a man for a formal event, perhaps
Glenn Close and Kevin Kline, as just seen in the previous sequence, and then the
last shot was a “reveal” of the sutured wrist of the corpse. Perhaps I had seen a
review beforehand, but I don’t recall ever being fooled that way, always taking it
to be Alex’s corpse. On Kasdan’s interpretation, though, we have another layer:
not only is (real) Costner playing a (fake) corpse, but the (fake) corpse is playing
a (fake) Costner.
Readers will also recall that I previously discussed, briefly, The Big Chill in
“The Gilmore Girls Occupy Wall Street” but only in the context of what might
be called Liberal Psycho-Geography, their strange preference for living in small
towns, even rural communities, once they have been cleansed of those dirty
White Others who actually created the towns and communities.
In the case of the sad sacks gathered at Alex’s funeral, they were only happy
living together back in Ann Arbor, under the charismatic leadership of Alex,
some kind of sophomore Tim Leary or Mark Rudd (these would have been the
deleted Costner scenes). Now, his suicide has brought them back together in a
similar locus, the conveniently large house of the most adult couple among them,
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now living in conveniently rural but Yuppie-friendly South Carolina.
The gang is clearly some kind of Männerbund, now bereft of their spiritual
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leader. But it’s an unusual one: multi-sexual and multi-ethnic, and above all,
characterized by fakery and failure. The complete failure of their lives, most
dramatically Alex himself, might lead one to question his bona fides as a guru,
but like most Liberals, what they’ve learned is mostly an intense self-regard,
which makes it impossible to “check their premises,” as Ayn Rand used to
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say.
Nick: Wise up, folks. We’re all alone out there and tomorrow we’re going
out there again.
Rather than the more obviously Männerbund-ish features, I’d like to focus on
something at first glance entirely different: Sarah has the bright idea to solve
Meg’s worries about never finding a man to have a child with, by loaning her
husband, Harold.
In my previous essay, I passed this off as an ostentatious, Bloomsbury-like
nose-thumbing of “bourgeois morality.” Oddly enough, Hans Blüher, the theorist
of the Männerbund, provides a more interesting perspective.
Through Wulf Grimsson, whose work we drew on for our Untouchables
essay, I’ve obtained one of the few English translations of one of Blüher’s public
lectures, in which he lays out his theory of sexuality, the family, and the
Männerbund.
In “Family and Male Fraternity,” he discusses at one point the role of
creativity in responding to the demands of new situations. Traditions, to be vital,
must respond to new conditions, and in the process, what once were sins may
become moral, as they facilitate the creation of a new tradition. (One thinks
perhaps of Carl Schmitt’s doctrine of the Exception.) In considering the modern
problems besetting the tradition of monogamy, Blüher spurns the advocates of
“free love” as not having thought out and found a creative solution to the
practical problems, such as jealousy. Here he writes:
Jealousy is the will to have an exclusive right on the sexual partner and
illustrates all over again the myth of the human being cut in two and
deprived of his other half. Because after all there can only be one other
half! Jealousy is really the destructive element within a polygamous
marriage. Jealousy can never be eliminated by affectionate persuasions, by
calming appeasements or any kind of rational arrangement, but only by a
great creative act of the Eros itself. Let me give a comparison from German
philosophy. Arthur Schopenhauer speaks at several points in his work of so-
called “conversions.” A criminal, who is just going to the scaffold and who
until recently has had no remorse for his crime, is suddenly enlightened. . . .
A man is not purified through a gradual diminution of sin—to believe
this would just be muddled ignorance and rationalism—but through a
sudden change of his whole nature. The bigger his sin was, the more he is
purified. The same thing can happen with jealousy.
Jealousy is the real sin against the creative Eros. In the case of
exceptional women, there are rare moments where this usually destructive
passion can turn around, can place itself into the service of the former rival
and can increase the love of two women for the man whom they both love.
On such a basis the will of the man is creating the sacrament of polygamy.
Without this sacrament, which the Greeks called mysterion, all polygamous
relationships are doomed to end in the most distressful disaster. Something
permanent can only come about where a sacrament (a mystery in the Greek
sense) stands between people, where devotion, sacrifice and service are
involved. Polygamy needs a state of grace and cannot be “made.”
Are Meg and Sarah such exceptional women? (Note Blüher’s use of the
Schmittian term.) Sarah, despite her marriage, children, and homemaking, and
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her general “earth mother” portrayal, and Meg, despite her distinctly non-hip
obsession with finding a man to have a child with (which would be mocked as
’60s stupidity on Mad Men today), are both played by decidedly “mannish”
actresses. Glenn Close, who received her first Oscar nomination for this role,
received her most recent this year for a role in which she portrays a woman
living as a man, while Mary Kay Place eventually “came out” as a lesbian.
When she first arrives, Meg wears neither the ’80s shoulder-padded woman’s
“power suit” nor the later Hilary-style “pants suit” but what looks like a boy’s
suit, complete with white shirt, striped tie, and attache case—in the
contemporaneous Official Preppy Handbook, women were advised to check out
the boy’s department at Brooks Brothers for appropriate attire.
She and Richard are the only ones dressed like real grown up men, and both
have thought a lot about what a man should be. Like Richard’s late night speech,
she provides a surprisingly contemporary meditation on modern manhood:
Meg: They’re either married or gay. And if they’re not gay, they’ve just
broken up with the most wonderful woman in the world, or they’ve just
broken up with a bitch who looks exactly like me. They’re in transition
from a monogamous relationship, and they need more space. Or they’re
tired of space, but they just can’t commit. Or they want to commit, but
they’re afraid to get close. They want to get close, you don’t want to get
near them.
Meg: It’s a cold world out there. Sometimes I feel like I’m getting a little
frosty myself.
As Capone says, “If you were a man, you’d have done it.” And we know what
“doing it” means. As Blüher says, “Where is the important man who would be
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content with just one woman?”
Meg accepts Sarah’s offer of Harold only as last resort, having considered and
dismissed all the inadequate man-children available that weekend (including a
“return engagement” with the Jew, Michael). Her choice, adultery if not quite a
ménage à trois, is made to further a higher tradition, motherhood.
It’s even possible, though it passes as a joke, that Meg’s wisdom was what
killed Alex:
Meg: The last time I spoke with Alex, we had a fight. I yelled at him.
Nick: That’s probably why he killed himself. . . . What was the argument
about?
Meg: I told him he was wasting his life.
Having devoted considerable time and attention to the genres of weird fiction
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and science fiction, it is perhaps long overdue that I should spend some time
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considering the remaining one of the Three Disreputable Genres, detective
fiction.
The transition is made easier by the fact that the inventor of the detective tale,
by most accounts, is that master of the weird tale, Edgar A. Poe, who in turn
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Lovecraft considered his own master.
I suspect that, as with weird fiction and science fiction, the persistent
popularity of this looked-down-upon genre—one often considered no more than
a mere personal quirk or obsession—lies in its ability to present Traditional
metaphysical themes no longer countenanced by mainstream fiction, or culture
in general. Let’s see!
In dealing with detective fiction, one must, of course, deal with the epoch-
making figure of Sherlock Holmes.
The first thing writers on Sherlock Holmes feel the need to tackle is the
question of the overwhelming cultural impact of these tales of a late
Victorian/early Edwardian private (or “consulting”) detective. The only rival,
though still subject to far less fan obsession, is that other British chap, James
Bond, secret agent, of whom more anon.
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As usual, Colin Wilson has an interesting and useful theory about this. He
attributes the overwhelming and continued fascination with Holmes to Doyle
having, quite inadvertently, solved an important problem in spiritual evolution:
The rise of literacy among the populace led to an obsession with the realistic
novel (itself an innovation of Cervantes, Richardson, Defoe and others).
You would have to imagine that Sir Walter Raleigh brought back marijuana
from the New World, and all Europe became pot smokers. This taste for
escaping into worlds of fantasy swept across Europe, and literature gained an
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important that it had never possessed in any previous age.
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A point often missed, especially by literary critics of the Realist camp, is
that this involves more than the accumulation of precise detail, important though
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that is. Among realists, Dumas would always be more popular than Balzac,
and even within Dickens, Pickwick Papers would be more popular than “better”
novels like Hard Times. “They are too ‘real,’” says Wilson, “and they lack the
element of the wish-fulfillment fantasy.”
The point is, to get the two together, in the right proportion: the wish-
fulfillment fantasy, with enough realistic detail to assure us that this, unlike a
child’s fairy-tale, is real.
Consider Manhunter, Michael Mann’s 1986 film based on Thomas Harris’ Red
Dragon. In pursuing the Tooth Fairy, FBI “manhunter” Will Graham knows that
he can’t be caught unless Graham can figure out what his fantasy is: to find his
motive, he must find out what he kills “to fuel his fantasy.” By the end,
“Are you sympathizing with this guy, Will?” Crawford asks offscreen.
Mann keeps the camera on Graham’s face. “Absolutely,” he answers. “My
heart bleeds for him as a child. . . . As an adult, someone should blow the
sick fuck out of his socks. Do you think that’s a contradiction, Jack? Does
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this kind of understanding make you uncomfortable?”
But then, around the turn of the 19th century, a problem developed; people
began to live too much, perhaps entirely, in their imaginations. Enter the literary
figure of the aesthete—Axel, Dorian Gray, and most notably Des Esseintes, the
protagonist of Huysmans’ À rebours (Against the Grain)—all living apart from,
and hostile to, the outside world, constructing their own, superior counter-world
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at home. Unfortunately, as Wilson points out, the world always wins; Des
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Esseintes ultimately sickens and must return to the hated Paris for treatment.
Holmes was at first a similar figure, holed up in his rooms at 221b Baker
Street, taking cocaine and Turkish coffee, gesturing “languidly.” As Wilson
notes, Doyle was commissioned to write the second Holmes novel, The Sign of
the Four, by the same publisher, at the same dinner party, that produced The
Picture of Dorian Gray, just two years after À rebours.
But unlike either character, Holmes evolves a solution to the problem: crime;
or rather, the solution of crimes, the pursuit of justice: “He has not turned his
back on the world; on the contrary, he regards himself as a last court of appeal.”
This has a sound basis in Tradition. From Plato (The Myth of the Cave) to
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Emericus Durden, the path of the Realized Man involves not only rising to the
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heights but also a return to live among us.
As Krishna explains his role as avatar:
Holmes sees something invisible to the police, to the characters who are
victims of the scam, and, of course to the eternally astonished Watson:—
namely, that “the line of fine shops and stately business premises . . . really
abutted on the other side upon the faded and stagnant square.” The fact that
the two neighborhoods are physically next to each other is invisible to
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Watson because socially and imaginatively they are so far apart.
Like Poe, Lovecraft, and other writers of weird fiction (as well as such
Traditionalists as Guénon and Evola),
McCrea also agrees with Wilson in seeing Holmes as a fin de siècle figure, a
withdrawn dandy, but fails to notice any development of the sort Wilson
descries. Instead, he takes the idea in a different and equally intriguing direction:
“Holmes is a bohemian bachelor who abhors family life.”
Yet Holmes himself is a confirmed bachelor who lives, on and off, with a
male companion. Watson, just as he intermediates between Holmes and the
reader, is never fully part of either realm, the bohemian bachelor life he
shares with Holmes or the heterosexual family world which he ostensibly
joins when he marries. . . . Watson shuttles anxiously back and forth
between them, supposedly living at home with Mary, but moving back to
Baker Street whenever there is a crime to solve. . . . From the point of view
of the reader, he is married to Holmes. What seems to engrave itself more
than anything else on our reading memories is the domestic life of 221b
Baker Street. Holmes and Watson sitting in their rooms, reading the
newspapers, discussing Mrs. Hudson’s cooking, or waiting for the door bell
to ring and a stranger to arrive with a new mystery to solve.
Refreshingly, McCrea dismisses any concern over the question “Is Holmes
gay?” one way or another. Instead, he picks a different thread to unravel:
What we can say for sure is that Holmes stands emblematically outside of
the economy of marriage and reproduction.
Holmes is most often called in to help where the family is failing or under
threat.
Here we see Holmes and Watson taking on the role we’ve called attention to
before: the Männerbund, the “band apart,” outside of but not hostile to the
family unit; indeed, by its very isolation, able to come to its defense in desperate
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times.
This cultural role parallels the (paradoxical, to some) biological role of
homosexuality in enabling large groups of mammals to survive, by allowing
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some members to be always available for defense, food gathering, etc.
This raises another, subtle point (though I doubt McCrean notices). The
homosexual is often the homophobic Right’s favorite straw man for “those with
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no concern for future generations.” And yet isn’t the Right—the non-
libertarian, at least—concerned above all with the past, and the preservation
thereof? In a word, archeofuturism?
The gaze of the stories is fixed firmly on the past, on how things turned out
as they did, not on what they will or might become. The mysteries, even
when solved, leave us with a sense that underneath ordinary daily life there
might always lie something old and dark and violent that will return in an
unpredictable form.
McCrea also make an important point about the use of Watson, which returns
us to our them of wish-fulfillment:
One of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up. He knew the type
well and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct
consequence of giving votes to women and ‘‘sex equality.’’ As a result of
fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being
transferred to males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet
completely homosexual, but confused, not knowing what they were. . . . He
was sorry for them, but he had no time for them.”
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Sounds like something right out of today’s man-o-sphere. Bond is really
rather a crusty old reactionary—part of his “Queen and country” mentality that
explains his perverse championing of the British, who haven’t mattered since the
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days of Bulldog Drummond.
Amis, however, is at pains to point out, in that carefully cataloging way of his,
that Bond seldom beds more than one or two ladies per book, a rather modest
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count, well within the “I could do that” mode of successful wish fulfilment.
More importantly, Don Juanism is easily seen as a cover for latent
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homosexuality; Bond’s marriage is quickly erased by Blofeld, who then
replaces Tracy as the object of Bond’s obsessions. Once Blofeld too is
dispatched, the energy of the series—perhaps also due to Fleming’s physical
decline—drops off dramatically, and it really just peters out.
Amis is correct to suggest that both M and the various super-villains function
as surrogate fathers for Bond, who is intimidated by their worldly sophistication
and punished for his transgressions and inadequacies; M and the villains both do
so with snide comments and other displays of superiority, the villains ultimately
inflicting corporal punishment as well.
All this is echoed in the recent (supposed) Internet surge to have Gillian
Anderson take over the role of Bond. Although popular with a certain generation
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of post-humanist nerds, a number of problems seem obvious.
First, the whole “Jane Bond” idea has already been exploited by the porn
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industry.
More importantly, a female Bond completely ruins the ratio of detailed
realism vs. wish fulfillment; as New Rightists frequently point out, real world
women just can’t do that stuff, and it’s even dangerous—to them—to pretend
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otherwise.
As Tim Stanley insists:
Here’s what I’m not saying: that women can’t play men’s parts. They
can, they have and it can be illuminating. The problem is that the switch is
almost always highly self-conscious—it’s done to make an artistic point.
When a woman plays Hamlet, the audience is in on the conceit and
feminising the role adds new depths to it. When Cate Blanchett played Bob
Dylan in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There it was to make the point that Dylan’s
constant search for meaning, and his ready identity with outlaws, meant that
he could just as easily be played a woman as by Marcus Carl Franklin, a
black adolescent, or Richard Gere, an ageing Billy the Kid.
By contrast, the desire to see a woman play Bond is purely so that a
woman can play Bond—and with the absurd proviso that we’d all have to
act like we hadn’t noticed. The idea is both dumb and dishonest.
Sure, make a film about an ass-kicking female spy who beds everyone
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she meets and drives a Lotus underwater. But don’t call her Bond.
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The Bond world as a whole, then, is a Männerbund, or rather, a sort of
world-wide public school in which Bond is trained for membership. The
dynamic is all two-way, Bond/M or Bond/Villain, with the villain trying to win
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Bond over to “the dark side” like Emperor Palpatine. The famous “Bond Girl”
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can at most take the place of Watson, with generally unsatisfactory results.
I suspect that the lack of a Watson figure accounts for the relatively lower
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level of personal obsession with Bond, whatever his world-wide fame; for all
his solitude and singularity, Holmes needs a Watson, not a Bond Girl, for the
reader’s interest to crystalize around. But as always, your mileage may differ:
I’ve learned a whole lot about life from James Bond, and I will continue to
defend Bond and continue seeing these films from now till my dying breath
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. . . unless they make Bond black.
Foster is a member of that curious set of Hollywood figures who come from
privileged backgrounds: John Lodge, Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey
Bogart, Otto Kruger, director Robert Aldrich. She attended a French-
language prep school, the Lycée Français de Los Angeles, and since her
teens has frequently lived and worked in France.
For “privileged” read: upper class WASP; in Foster’s case, descendants of
Mayflower passengers; for Bogart, a society doctor and a famed illustrator. He
attended, but was expelled from, Phillips Andover; and while he may never have
dubbed his own films like Foster, I heard he’s really big in France anyway.
Kanfer says he needs to examine not only the social context Bogart emerged
from, but also “the changing image of masculinity in the movies”—at which
point I, and perhaps you, usually cringe. But fear not, there’s no “queer
theorizing” or anything particularly feminist here. What emerges, perhaps
unconsciously, is a portrait of the actor as the embodiment of Aryan Virtue.
For all his rebellions against [his parents], for all his drunken sprees and
surly postures, Humphrey could not escape the central fact of his life. He
was the son of straitlaced parents whose roots were in another time. Their
customs and attitudes may have become outmoded, but they were deeply
ingrained in their son. . . . They showed in his upright carriage and in his
careful manner of speaking, in his courtesy to women and frank dealing
with men. He came to recognize that he gave “the impression of being a
Nineteenth Century guy,” no matter how hard he tried to be au courant. But
it worked in his favor. (p. 20)
It helped first of all because the theatrical fashion at the time was for indolent
playboys, but although looking the part, Bogart was actually not very good
playing it; as we shall see, it was miscasting that made his career. (Near the end
of his career he made another, failed stab at playing a Long Island playboy-
industrialist in Sabrina.) It played a more important role behind the scenes;
Bogart learned early that “there were only two kinds of actors, professionals and
bums” (pp. 19–20), and he had resolved never to be a bum.
Directors liked how dependable Bogart was, always showing up on time and
knowing his lines, and saving the drinking, though heavy, for after hours. (His
frustration on Sabrina showed when he insisted on leaving the set each day at
the contractual 6 p.m., no matter what, after an assistant handed him his
highball.) Actresses liked to work with him because there was no funny
business, and actors trusted him not to upstage them. Once he got a leg up in the
movie business, he remembered his friends, and lent a helping hand to Peter
Lorre, Fatty Arbuckle, Gene Tierney, and Joan Bennett.
During the run of Petrified Forest Bogart “made a special point of being
courtly offstage, in direct contrast to [his character’s] snarling persona.”
It was now apparent to all . . . that he was truly old school. He never
believed in totally immersing himself in a character; there was no fusing of
the performer and the part that was to mark film and stage acting in the
decades to come. (p. 39)
Although the country was well over 90% white, apparently Hollywood was so
Judaificated by 1934 that a real WASP was a hot new commodity; and just the
thing to portray the new White Rage rising in the heartland. Today, Bogart might
be playing Timothy McVeigh, or debuting in Natural Born Killers.
Tom Shone’s review has nicely summarized the interplay of Bogart’s heritage,
career, and legend:
His entire film career was to rest on a single, judiciously prolonged piece of
miscasting: his stiff, slightly old-fashioned patrician bearing was slightly
redundant when deployed in the service of patricians, but transplanted into
the bodies of toughs, condemned men, and private eyes—the closest the
modern world has to the knights of the round table—and the result was a
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brand of hard-bitten, rueful integrity that fit the times like a glove.
More than half of the hostile witnesses had lied to their own lawyers
about their Communist past or present, and presented themselves to the
Committee for the First Amendment [the support group Bogart had joined]
as innocent victims framed by the government.
After witnessing their performance at the hearings, and making a few
inquiries of his own, “Bogart was furious” one blacklistee recalled,
“shouting at Danny Kaye, ‘You fuckers sold me out.’” (p. 127)
Alistair Cooke later recalled: “Bogart was aghast” to discover how many of
the protestors “were down-the-line Communists coolly exploiting the protection
of the First and Fifth Amendments. . . . He had thought they were just
freewheeling anarchists, like himself” (p. 127).
If Bogart was an anarchist, he was a Conservative Anarchist, in the tradition
of Céline or Jünger, whose “Anarch” sounds like the typical Bogart character:
[A]n extreme aloofness, which nourishes itself and risks itself in the
borderline situations, but only stands in an observational relationship to the
world, as all instances of true order are dissolving and an “organic
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construction” is not yet, or no longer, possible.
Or even a “Bohemian Tory” like Noël Coward, men for whom personal
integrity, professionalism and loyalty to friends—like Foster with Gibson,
Bogart stood behind those he could personally vouch for, using his star power to
keep them working—were more important that politics or ideological purity.
And to that extent Kanfer is justified in finding Bogart to have created a “new”
masculinity, not the “post-feminist” sort but more like one of Evola’s “men
among the ruins.”
[To name names or not] was a matter of great importance to those affected,
but it was not the only way to take the measure of a man, and many refused
to be defined in such narrow terms. Humphrey Bogart was one of them. As
the decade wound down, he continued to present his own brand of
masculinity, which had nothing to do with polemics [such as the contrasting
but self-exculpating works of Miller or Kazan]. (p. 132)
He and Bogie were guests of Clifton Webb one weekend. Bogie and Noël
were assigned to the same room, and Noël was gay, as everybody on Earth
knew, but nobody cared, because he was so great. Just to be in his presence
was quite enough. And at the end of the evening one night, they were
changing into their PJs to hit the sack. Bogie was sitting on the edge of the
bed, and at one point put his hand on Noël’s knee. Bogie said: “Noël, I have
to tell you that if I had my druthers and I liked guys you would be the one
I’d want to be with. But, unfortunately, I like girls.” And from that moment
on Noël never mentioned it, and Bogie never mentioned it. Class behavior!
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And they became fast, fast friends.
In his final chapter Kanfer addresses his broader theme: the unprecedented
dominance of the Bogie icon. He gave us the answer already on his very first
page, when he corrects Norma Desmond: the pictures did become bigger, and the
actors smaller. The 20 highest-grossing films of all time are all “blockbusters”
made for teen audiences, and their actors have the same dewy innocence and
immaturity. Since it’s experience that produces character, today’s actors,
however highly trained, are indistinguishable and interchangeable; no one,
Kanfer points out, impersonates Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, or
Christian Bale, the way men like Bogart or Cagney or even wispy Jimmy
Stewart were a staple part of a comedian’s repertoire.
One could quibble a bit here; Christian Bale, certainly, has given comics from
South Park to Riff Trax a comedic foothold with his raspy Batman voice. And
Bale’s The Dark Knight, despite showing up as Number 8 on Kanfer’s list, is
arguably at least an attempt to create a more mature, more conflicted, Batman,
perhaps not unlike one of Bogart’s bad guys with principles, making hard
choices in a world morally adrift (See Trevor Lynch’s meditations on The Dark
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Knight.)
On the other hand, I confess that even after watching it about eight times, I
still don’t understand the narrative of The Departed, since the three principals,
Mark Wahlberg, Matt Damon, and, yes, DiCaprio, seem exactly the same person
to these old eyes. (Or was that deliberate?) Needless to say, no problem
recognizing old school Jack Nicholson. Of course, Bogart’s scars, lisp, and
cigarette-rasp were only the external signs, useful for an actor, of his inner
maturity. In his review of Kanfer cited above, Shone also says: “These days, we
measure toughness by the damage dished out to others—by body counts and kill
ratios. Bogart’s toughness was an inside job.”
In Men Among the Ruins, Baron Evola summarized The Roman, and generally
The Aryan, style as:
[I]t totally turns around the usual new age idea of critique of ideology,
which would be: “in everyday life we have ideological glasses, learn to put
down, take off, the glasses, and see with your own eyes reality the way it
is.” No, unfortunately, it doesn’t work like this. Liberation hurts. You have
to be forced to put your glasses on. (Slavoj Žižek, “They Live! Hollywood
as an Ideological Machine”)
Lethem starts off by calling to our attention that once we get away from the
homeless camp, the LA scenes, especially Holly’s apartment, look like porn sets.
True, but I’d just say that all of Southern California looks like a porn set to these
New York eyes and leave it at that; Curb Your Enthusiasm, for example, looks
like a porn shoot to me; but Lethem wants to use this to set up his notion that
there’s some kinda homoeroticism going on between Frank and Nada. Noting
their obvious racial polarity, he trots out the tired Huck and Jim thesis of Judaic
critic Leslie Fiedler, who tried to reduce all American literature to variations on
boys on the raft.
(The ne plus ultra of this was probably the Penguin Classics edition of Moby
Dick, where critic Harry Beaver [!] created a 300 page text with 200 pages of
endnotes detailing line by line Melville’s “phallic imagination”—Harpoons!
Coffins! Peg-legs! Oysters! Dogs and cats living together!)
I take Frank’s invitation to introduce Nada to the homeless encampment (hot
food and showers!) as recruitment not into a sexual liaison but into a proto-
Männerbund of working class types banding together in the economic chaos
(though, as we have seen, not a very lively one, but serving to get him across the
street to the fake church were he meets the real revolutionaries). Nada will return
the favor when he later beats the truth into Frank, Fight Club style.
Lethem would have saved himself some idle speculations, and real
puzzlements, such as why Nada later takes a younger version of himself under
his wing, if he had understood better that, as he says: “If it’s not that kind of
hookup scene, it’s still a hookup scene.” As he says later, when Nada spews
stupid, supposedly clever one-liners about ugly female ghouls, “this man of the
people is more of the male than the female people.” And later, during the shoot-
em-up at the Cable 54 offices, “He really shouldn’t be looking for Holly; he’s
got no knack with women.”
The Männerbund theme continues even when Nada “hooks up” with Holly,
played by the “eerie” and ineffable Meg Foster.
Lethem is correct to point out she is indeed strikingly “mannish” for a
nevertheless attractive woman (originally cast in TV’s Cagney and Lacey, she
was dropped because she made Tyne Daly look too feminine!), which may have
something to do with Nada’s oddly unmotivated rage against how ugly the
female ghouls appear to him; he has firm though offbeat ideas about beauty.
And though dark haired she has eyes that “are such a pale shade of blue
they’re nearly a special effect” by themselves. He alludes to her roles in The
Scarlet Letter (19th century American lit again!) and The Osterman Weekend,
but I find it more interesting to compare her role just the year before in the
otherwise atrocious Masters of the Universe, where her hard face and unearthly
eyes work well for the straightforwardly and extra-dimensionally evil character
called Evil-lyn (it’s that kind of movie), playing against another muscular blonde
hero, Dolph Lundgren as He-Man.
Mannish though she is, Holly will, of course, turn out to be the femme fatale
to infiltrate the group and betray everyone, even killing Frank. Lethem nicely
points out that this unexpected turn makes it seem like genre conventions are
attacking our poor heroes; like Full Metal Jacket or The Shining, halfway
through the film, the sci-fi metaphysics stop, and suddenly it’s an action flick,
then a film noir.
Throughout the book, Lethem comments on the oddly pedestrian, that is,
walk-around, flâneur-like LA in the film, so unlike the freeway-LA we think we
know, and comes up with various explanations, including budget restraints. To
me, the answer is simple; Carpenter sets the whole film in some kind of post-
Reagan hyper-recession; jobs have disappeared, workers are migratory (Frank
from Detroit, Nada from Denver), riding the rails, working under the counter,
etc. Who can afford to drive, except the “Well Dressed Man” at the newsstand,
who’s a ghoul, or Holly, who’s a mole for the ghouls? The supposed “real face”
of Reagan’s Morning in America.
8. Making the film as early as 1988 gives it the look of Leftist hysteria, but in
fact the process was underway, it just took 30 years and two busted bubbles to
make everyone realize that while we were putting everything on the card, the
real jobs were shipped out, and the real money was siphoned off, not so much by
yuppies (who are as mortgage-strapped as the rest of us, just with bigger houses)
but the really big guys, the bankers. Frank and Nada’s car-less wanderings, and
the packed streets, give the film a contemporary, not a dated, look.
9. Another theme dear to the New Right: the ghouls are outright colonizers
and parasites, not even illegal aliens (like District Nine) you might work up
some Ellis Island sympathy for, like the sociopathic Sicilians we now welcome
as “Italian American patriots,” and they’re coruscating ugly, and even worse,
they want to wear our best clothes (like “Well Dressed Man”) and make it with
our smooth, pink bodies.
There’s no chance for the “traditional science-fiction platitude, with its
overtones of Franz Boas cultural relativism.” When a ghoul cop tries the Good
Cop routine and suggests “You look just as ugly to us” Nada responds with
Randian certitude and contempt: “Impossible.” It reminds me of the scene where
Toohey tries to confront Roark, but Roark just walks away. Lethem refers to
Carpenter’s ’50s film outlook again, and he’s right. Not for nothing does
Carpenter idolize John Ford and admire the Ford-influenced The Thing enough
to remake it. The comparable exchange in the ’50s Thing: “What do you do with
a carrot? You cook it.”
10. Lethem contrasts this with another late ’80s sci-fi film, Blade Runner,
where the replicants are more sympathetic than the humans, and the
controversies over whether Deckard himself is a replicant. I would again match
him with Lovecraft. Lovecraft certainly loathed furriners, especially immigrants.
The Old Ones certainly seem to covet warm human flesh, and several characters
are half-breeds of such couplings, who, in accordance with Lovecraft’s strict
morality (or bigotry) must be evil and come to bad ends, like Wilbur in “The
Dunwich Horror” that Carpenter’s pseudonym alludes to. His brother, “who
looked more like the father,” is a monster killed by the scientists at the end; the
narrator of The Shadow Over Innsmouth gradually realizes he is one of the fish-
people himself and presumably will shoot himself at the end; the eponymous
Arthur Jermyn discovers he is the offspring of an ape mother, and burns himself
alive (although this might be one of the Darwinian Lovecraft’s little jokes). Poor
Akeley, beset by Plutonian immigrant miners in “The Whisperer in Darkness” is
fooled into joining the Plutonian race, having his brain boxed up with the
promise of being shipped off to see the sights of the galaxy, perhaps the ones
Roy recalls at the end of Blade Runner. Most notably, Professor Peaslee in The
Shadow Out of Time has his mind “kidnapped” and transferred into the “rugose
cone” body of a Cyclopean prehistoric race—brain rape!—when he finally
works up the courage to look in a mirror at his new body, he shrieks and faints,
as does “The Outsider” when a mirror reveals that he is a rotting corpse. Nada,
Lethem points out, never turns the glasses on himself in a mirror.
But there is another vein in Lovecraft, part of his “cosmic awe.” Peaslee
learns to appreciate and admire the super-intelligent cones, rugose or not; the
narrator in At the Mountains of Madness sympathizes with the specimens of the
ancient race dug out of the ice only to be attacked by dogs. As the Templars
came to admire the Moslem warriors they fought, anyone who peers deeply into
a religion or culture of his own may be able to recognize the value of an alien’s,
but at such a deep, shared level that talk of conversion or “relativism” is inane.
But still, not with these guys. They’re space yuppies, practicing planetary
gentrification, and ugly as cheese dip from 1957. Nada kills the cop and steals
his weapons.
11. As a boomer myself, I find it mind-boggling that Lethem attributes the line
“ten thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire” to “Yellow Submarine”; in fact,
since “A Day in the Life” is usually held up as some kind of “classic work of
timeless genius,” to misattribute an image, and to such a dopey song, seems
unforgivable in general; or is he deliberately thumbing his nose at the middle-
brows?
12. But, just a page or two later, he redeems himself with this: “it’s hard to
imagine that at the ghouls’ first job fair the position of Fatuous Cocktail-swilling
Jackass didn’t have willing applicants lined up around the block.” I can’t wait to
use that line myself, maybe even on myself.
13. Holy cow, now Lethem’s calling the same character “the cockroach of the
human spirit.” He’s using my meme!
14. Lethem’s giving us some freeze-dried lecture on how “post-Freudian,
post-Virginia Woolf” readers demand characters that are flawed, even
treacherous; he thinks this is an index of how seriously a work is intended, or
even, he adds ominously, “how seriously it is likely to be received”—by the
literary gatekeepers, like him, of course. If you don’t know where this is going,
he tells us “If Shakespeare had written The Lord of the Rings, its title would be
Gollum.” (And I guess if Shakespeare had written Hamlet, its title would have
been Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.)
And there, in admittedly a neat little phrase, is a perfect example of the Judaic
Plan for Culture Distortion; how even already existing classic literature can be
“taught” in ways that inculcate the cockroach mentality. And after all, is not the
plea that “we” prefer such “complex” and twisted characters simple egotism?
Does the Jew not recognize himself in such figures (just as Freud’s so-called
science was an impudent projection of the Judaic domestic scene onto all
mankind)? Surely Gollum is the Jew of the Ring films; did people not complain
of the role’s “anti-Semitism”? It is the Jew who finds such characters
“intriguing,” not the Aryan public, which is why normal stories keep getting
written and filmed, since they are demanded by the public (adjusted for inflation,
the all-time box office hit: Gone with the Wind), and the Judaic gatekeepers keep
having to push them back underwater and “demand” “more serious” ones.
Lethem keeps trying to insinuate, in that Judaic way, that we really like the
bum-turned-traitorous big-shot, Drifter, that we’d really like to be him, in fact,
far more than that dumb, boring blond hero. It surfaces again when he discusses
the poor Pregnant Woman with Coffee Pot who gets in Nada’s way during the
shoot-out, specifically connecting her with Frances Dormand’s character in
Fargo, the Coen Brothers’ festival of Judaic paranoia, dividing the goyim into
two groups, murderous blond beasts and simple-minded law enforcers (who,
implicitly, will protect the Jews from the first group). You want to play that
game, Jonathan? OK, Nada embodies both; while we know he’s a simple guy
just trying to save us, to the office workers he’s just a murderous workplace
psycho. Oh, and your precious Coen Bros. stole Lebowski from . . . Drifter!
Maybe it was a mistake to try and read this all in one sitting. I’m starting to
feel a little woozy, more than a little cranky. If you took my suggestion at the
beginning to do this, go back, you fools! Only a few pages of the book, less than
two minutes of the film, are left, and Lethem is really working my nerves. First,
he quotes G. K. Chesterton—when’s the last time you saw that, outside the New
Oxford Review or maybe that Catholic cable channel? But then, he follows it up
some “film curator” guy who says that “we who live in the urban centers” both
fear and loathe the denizens of the heartland, whom “we” perceive as “Bible-
thumping, gun-toting” nut jobs “like the Unabomber.” Uh, the Unabomber?
Harvard, brilliant mathematician, Manifesto published in the New York Times, oh
yeah, that cracker dumbass. Alright buddy, Mr. “Milan Film Festival” jag-off,
you’ve asked for it. I’ve run out of bubble gun . . . I mean, gum.
15. But wait, as I move down the hallway for my stolen police rifle, I pass a
mirror . . . look in . . . My God! The blue skin, the robotic eyes! You others, drop
the book, before it’s too late . . . save yourselves! As for me . . . I have fallen into
the cheese dip . . .
Over the last year or two, the value or usefulness of popular music, and rock
in particular, to the struggle to renew White Consciousness has been subject to
debate. These discussions have made important points, but too often they suffer
from a lack of historical, and perhaps metaphysical, data. In this essay I will
examine some of the most interesting of these recent online discussions, and
suggest how they might profit from a little re-orientation in the light of such
White musical pioneers Varg Vikernes and Scott Walker, as well as the writings
of Julius Evola and Alain Daniélou on music from the Traditionalist point of
view.
In “How About Some Good Old Love Songs From Alleged ‘Right Wing’
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Groups?” Andrea O. Letania—proprietress of the “Neo-Fascist” pop culture
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blog Once Upon a Time in America, whose title alone makes me want to call
her a comrade—calls attention to an important issue—“Given that the main
point of popular music is to appeal to the opposite sex, how can right-wing rock
appeal to most ladies out there?”—and raises some interesting questions, but too
many questionable assumptions prevent her from making any real headway
toward a solution.
First, she seems to think that the “right wing” milieu is characterized by a love
of Metal. This may be broadly true, especially among groups that either
themselves or by their music cause the mainstream media to have convulsions,
and hence get lots of press, but arguably the most characteristic, and interesting,
current is composed of the small but deeply loyal tributaries making up what’s
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been called alt-folk, or apocalyptic folk, etc., which are hardly male-only
when it comes to performers, audience, or even distributors (hello, Jane
Elizabeth!). For more on this “scene traditionalism,” see the articles on Mark
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Sedgwick’s blog as well as Josh Buckley’s comments on the same blog:
But let’s look at Metal itself. Letania finds it either impossibly “hard” or else
given to “kitschy mythic airs.” As for the latter, I thought girls liked stories of
castles and unicorns. And anyway, it’s hardly any more “monotonous” than rap
(and considerably less vulgar and misogynistic, quite a trick for music that
supposedly appeals to adolescent boys) or the olde-tyme moon-June-spoon
songs our great-grandmothers sang around the parlor piano (while the men, I
guess, danced to John Philip Sousa marches).
However, Letania is exactly correct that “a rock band is supposed to do both,
which is why even the toughest rock bands have songs ranging from hard to
soft.” But this hardly sets aside Metal. Indeed, Metal was arguably created, as a
genre, by Led Zeppelin, and Zep is arguably still the greatest Metal band, not so
much for any specific musical or lyrical accomplishment, as for its ability, as
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Michael Hoffman emphasized, to rock both hard and soft equally well. In this
quote, he states Letania’s whole thesis quite well:
Classic Rock inherently has more potential for acid allusions, because it
includes the entire range from Heavy to Soothing, whereas Pop is limited to
Soothing, and Metal is limited to Heavy. This is why Led Zeppelin ranks at
the top of Rock history: a broad command of the full range of modes.
That’s why Pop and Metal have a harder time becoming Classic. Pop has
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the advantage of being acceptable in public.
Hoffman even seems to grant Letania’s dichotomy, but this is because he, like
most general culture critics, can’t be bothered to consider “popular” bands that
are popular precisely for their willingness to include the infamous “power
ballads” to keep the chicks happy.
In fact, when it comes to the ladies, Metal, despite its media image, has
historically had more than a little appeal. Though “hair metal” is universally
disparaged today, its continued existence reminds us that heavy music, as well as
such “gay” attributes as long hair and spandex attire, can be chick magnets, as
they were in the dreaded ’80s.
Or, since Letania speaks highly of Southern Rock, consider Black Oak
Arkansas. White skin, long blonde hair, and white spandex jeans, but it’s not
Ann Coulter! The chicks love Jim Dandy! And forget about “don’t ask don’t
tell.” Jim Dandy’s qualifications are on display for all to fall down before in lust
or despair.
What happened? Rather than disparaging Metal as such, we would be better
off looking for the cause exactly where “alleged ‘right wing’ groups” would
suggest: the Judaic-Negro conspiracy that, in defiance of market demand, took
White rock off MTV and force fed rap and its no-hair, no-ass “aesthetic.”
While the boys stayed loyal and metal flourished under the radar (who sold
more records, the Stones in 40 years or Metallica in 20? Metallica, of course),
the girls seem to have swallowed the whole Britney-and-rap cocktail. One might
speculate that the girls’ preferences reflect a greater conformism, or
susceptibility to media brainwashing, but I suppose that would be sexism.
From her description of what’s wrong with metal, I can imagine Varg Vikernes
would pretty well sum up her image of the Worst Alleged Right Wing music.
Yet, Varg may have the answer she seeks. While Letania wants soft but “rockin’”
music with romantic lyrics, Varg has questioned the appropriateness of “guitar
based” music entirely, when it come to White people. The music he’s been
releasing from his prison cell—how romantic is that?—sounds like nothing other
than what might just be called Aryan New Age, and what could be more female-
friendly than that?
Letania wants softer music, Varg to get rid of guitars altogether. But what if
we got rid of shredding guitars and pounding drums—how would we rock? This
leads to another question: does White music have, or need, rhythm? And what
does it matter?
Discussions of “implicit Whiteness” in popular music—such as this from
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Kevin MacDonald —tend to gravitate toward Heavy Metal and country rather
than “New Age” music, for obvious reasons; while all three are reviled, only
“New Age” is associated with hippies, yuppies, boomers, and other Left-of-
center types.
Yet consider this discussion of “New Directions for ‘New Age’”:
But even though Woods sees new-age music as a universal force for
change, the fact is that the audience is limited by age (mostly baby
boomers), race (mostly White), and class (mostly middle and up). Consider,
for example, this definition of new-age music offered by composer-
producer Steve Halpern in Patti Jean Birosik’s book The New Age Music
Guide: “Perhaps the most striking aspect of new-age music is its use of
rhythm—or, more accurately, its lack of it.” This characteristic alienates
vast numbers of listeners for whom rhythm is the thing—not just African-
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Americans and Latinos but people of all origins.
I ran across this while trying to save my lazy White ass by finding whether
someone had already typed up for me that quote from Halpern’s fine
Introduction to said book (an ancient tome from 1989, which, like other
culturally scorned material, is easily found for a buck or two).
Although intending exactly the opposite, the writer correctly ascertains the
obsession with rhythm characteristic of the primitive Negro mentality. And of
course, by “people of all origins” he means “formerly White people who have
been brainwashed by MSM and modern society in general into a grotesque
overvaluation of one, small, dispensable aspect of music, the better to reject their
entire culture in favor of an alien simulacrum.” As the White college student
famously said, “We don’t have any culture.”
Contrariwise, the author is unable to appreciate Halpern’s intriguing and
bracing embrace of the idea of “no rhythm” (and he, for his part, would be
horrified by my identification of it as “implicitly White”; note his name).
Although I’m sure Halpern is as PC as the rest of the New Age audience, his
discussion explicitly denigrates rhythm as a primitive and backward element
(“Cro-Magnon man pounding on skins and bones”), and explicitly welcomes the
modern technologies that have enabled new instruments, and new uses of old
instruments, without the “slave[ry]” of “the time machine.”
The surely accidental association of rhythm and slavery is both accurate and,
in this context, rather piquant. It’s like the railroad foreman in Blazing Saddles
demanding that his workers sing “a good ol’ nigger work song” and reminding
them that “when you was slaves, you sang like birds.”
Need one point out that, here again, the science and instruments are White
creations? Halpern’s techno-positivism would fit very comfortably in the late,
great Alisdair Clarke’s notion of Aryan Futurism.
Of course, it’s really just a question of emphasis; New Age music doesn’t lack
rhythm—an Amazon reviewer of the Windham Hill 20 year anniversary sampler
complains that it “has some rythmic [sic] and percussion pieces that are actually
gnarly and you want to hit the skip key on your CD player if you are looking for
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relaxing and meditative music” —it just isn’t interested in it, and prefers to
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emphasize more important elements.
As well, if it weren’t part of the PC catechism to praise Negroid rhythm (while
the author of the quote above would tear out his own tongue before uttering the
phrase “natural rhythm,”) we might point out that the much-vaunted “jazz”
music of the Negro is largely in basic 4/4 (as the [possibly] Judaic hipster Dave
Brubeck observed long ago, thus creating a profitable niche for himself), while
“(c)Rap” or “Rap(e)” music is even more primitive, merely amplifying said 4/4
“beat” to ear-splitting and gut-punching levels—again, thanks to the White
man’s technology—while also eliminating melody, which is usually
“sampled”—viz., looted—from White rock or pop (a technique already used by
jazz, where the compositional resources of oh-so-advanced “be-bop” rarely got
beyond stealing the chords of a Gershwin song and then wailing away).
What’s at issue here is not rhythm (seriously, did Mozart lack rhythm?) but
that amorphous thing (without which “it don’t mean a thing”) called “swing.”
Self-hating White critic Robert Palmer observed in his notes to the Ornette
Coleman box set that European imitators of “free jazz” were boring, because
they lacked what American Negroes had learned as entertainers: how to
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swing. As we have pointed out, this “swing” is by no means any kind of
“natural rhythm,” but a particular entertainment device, which Louis Armstrong
had to teach to Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra, despite their being “the finest
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musicians in Harlem.”
In short, a mere bit of early 20th-century show business mumbo-jumbo, easily
discarded by anyone interested in serious composition.
The pioneers of hip-hop, perhaps because not writing self-hating essays but
actually working with White technologies such as turntables, had more
appreciation of the “non-swinging” Europeans than Palmer. Afrika Bambaata
famously said of Kraftwerk that they “were so stiff, they swung.” He paid tribute
to them in the style of the Negro, by imitating—or again, looting—their work.
Still, a lesson for all those pitiable “whiggers” who are, in fact, just a more
literal-minded component of the general demoralized White society: the Negro
will never respect an imitator; he will, however, be compelled to admire the
sheer audacity of those who either ignore him, or, like Jimmy Page, loot with the
alacrity and joy of Viking raiders.
His most recent work embraces keyboard, synthesizers, and other electronic
methods—perhaps due to their availability in prison, since even Norwegian
prisons have their drawbacks—producing what might well be called “Death New
Age” (although “Black New Age” might be more accurate, it might have
paradoxical implications in the light of our discussion here).
Then he asks, “what does this music sound like?” and there the fissures begin
to appear.
Lumping together “several genres worthy of examination: neo-folk, Martial
Industrial, and various forms of extreme Metal, including Black Metal, Folk
Metal, and Viking Metal,” Kurtagić describes them as lyrically reflecting “a
decidedly pagan and neo-Romantic sensibility, emphasizing—always to a
harrowing degree—dark emotion and obscure mysticism” and musically as
“quite complex, drawing extensively from Classical and traditional Folk music,
with varied and layered instrumentation, expressionistic riffing, elaborate
orchestration, an epic sense of melody, and scintillating musicianship.”
He sums things up thusly:
Indeed. Then why does it all sound so much like a Chamber of Commerce-
sponsored concert of Judaic-manned and directed orchestras?
The problem with these genres of Metal, in fact, is exactly this combination of
truly “traditional folk” with the sounds, ideals and “musicianship” of what
Kurtagić and others take to be some kind of essentially Aryan High Musical
Culture—Kultur, if you will—which is actually a long- dead post-Renaissance
bourgeois taste, although it still apparently controls pop culture, zombie-like.
Rather than “putting an end to the liberal order,” these soi-disant “pagans” fall
to their knees (as Nietzsche described Wagner in composing Parsifal) before a
Romantic image of “inspired” conductors, overblown and overstaffed orchestras,
garish “temples of music,” and female-faint inducing “virtuosos” (usually
Judaic), shared by both Left and Right but in fact largely a creation of the
Judaic-owned gramophone business and the German-Jewish “refugees” from the
same Kultur-stratum that produced Adorno and the Frankfurt School.
Baron Evola noted in Ride the Tiger that all this bourgeois rubbish had
deserved to be scooped up and chucked out long ago, and that the only danger
had been that the younger generation, seeking—rightly—more authentic musical
experiences, had been steered not to their own indigenous music (as Bartók, for
example, tried to do) but rather to the sub-rational world of primitive Negroid
music which produced jazz and its descendants: the “beat” music Evola
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discusses and eventually Kurtagić’s Metal.
Another Traditionalist, Alain Daniélou, himself an accomplished musician
trained by authentic Hindu teachers, established the inferiority of Western
“classical” or “art” or “serious” music, based as it was on the Greek
misunderstandings of tonality, in comparison to integral musical systems such as
the Indian and Chinese, in his Music and the Power of Sound: The Influence of
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Tuning and Interval on Consciousness.
The whole development of Western music, its increasing “complexity” and
instrumentation, which the Metallers seem to ape, is really not “progress” but
just a desperate attempt to compensate for the meager, and increasingly
inadequate, expressive possibilities of this misbegotten system, while a
Mediaeval Indian musician, as Daniélou notes, could make rain appear by
sounding the correct notes!
Paradoxical as it may sound, it is precisely the lack of expressiveness in this
“scientific” and “evolving” system that has led, on the one hand, to the constant
development of bigger forces and wilder “effects” from Bach to Brahms
(Kurtagić’s “elaborate orchestrations” and “varied and layered instrumentation”),
with more and more “Romantic” virtuosi and “genius” conductors (his
“scintillating musicianship” to provide “expressionistic riffing”), finally burning
itself out with Strauss (who needed a wind machine!) and settling down with the
dour, unpopular—and Judaic—serialists (whose musical language, Colin Wilson
pointed out, was good for expressing only confusion and dread); and, on the
other hand, to the attraction, among both audience and composers, to “primitive”
314
music that seems, correctly, to be far more expressive and meaningful.
Daniélou tells the story of an Indian during the early Raj, who tried to imitate
“Western” music; he got together as many instruments as possible, and had them
play as loudly as possible, all different lines at the same time! An “emperor’s
new clothes” moment for the much vaunted Western “harmonic development” as
well as a nightmare recently reproduced, to much fanfare among White
“sophisticates,” by the Negro jazz cacophony called “Free Jazz.” And is it not
indeed the experience of the performance of one of these Metal bands?
By promoting the combination of Negro-derived “beat” music and putrescent
Klassical Kultur, Kurtagić and Metal are short-circuiting again the legitimate
hunger of the White population for its own traditional expressive folk music, as
well as delegitimizing new Aryan technical and musical explorations, such as
those of Vikernes and even New Age. He is in fact embodying, in one
simultaneous stance, Adorno’s successive Frankfurt School plans for fomenting
Communism by first promoting Schoenberg, then when that failed, concocting a
315
new, “sophisticated” form of jazz.
Of course, it’s all a question of tactics. No one is unsullied; “to live is to
collaborate” (Burroughs, Nova Express). If Vikernes is right, that all guitar-based
rock music is Negroid in inspiration, and Daniélou, that Western “serious” music
is a dead end, one still can, and must, distinguish that which is entirely harmful
to Whites (most pop music) and that which, perhaps due to its lyrical content, is
relatively positive (Metal).
Since the beginning of the last century, the White race has been trying to dig
its way out from under the Wrong Turn of the Renaissance. Some of those paths,
such as the embrace, by both “serious” composers and teenagers, of “more
soulful” music in the form of Negroid rhythm, have been further detours or even
dead ends. At this point, we need neither more soft ballads nor more neo-
classical flourishes. An authentic White music should proudly embody our race’s
unique characteristics—a Futurist focus not on the telluric mire of primitive
“rhythm” but the transcendence of time through technological innovation.
I have come to think that everything boils down to being born and raised in
Detroit, a late Boomer during the period when Detroit was the true workers’
paradise, the High Tide of the American Dream, up to about 1972, when the city,
and the country, and the West, entered its swift decline. Workers like my father
had good jobs with high pay and amazing benefits; in his case, not in the auto
industry, but the New York Central Railroad, itself soon to enter bankruptcy.
These were the last times that one man could support a family, buy a house
and car with cash, no loans or mortgages, and men were expected to actually be
doers rather than “consumers”; if shelves were needed, he made them, rather
than go to some Home Depot. This is the background against which I try to
analyze, and immunize myself from, all the post-1980 ideological nonsense of
the Identity Left and Free Market Right. Yes, even Richard Nixon, in the light of
today, was a wise and decent leader, and his world was the White Utopia.
More particularly, I witnessed in Detroit the utopia of White Youth—which I
have identified with the concept of Wild Boys that Burroughs was just
publishing at that time, as well as, later, with the Aryan Männerbund—that this
relative prosperity provided, epitomized by the revolutionary political and
musical groups of that time and place, unimaginable today; and also the
destruction of all that through the encroachment of the Negro. Let’s say that
having been exposed to “black educators,” I was already long familiar with
candidate Obama’s idea that there are “really” more than 50 states.
This is not to say that my upbringing was ideal; it was, in fact, quite eccentric,
to say the least. I was the only product of the late second marriage of a nearly
uneducated, nearly elderly, second generation Irishman to an even less educated
middle-aged woman he met in Nassau.
Even aside from this, both parents would likely be diagnosed today as autistic.
My father spent nearly every waking hour at work, by choice; having made a
mint and retired to the suburbs when I entered high school, he promptly dropped
dead.
My mother spent the entire time I knew her on a sofa, watching soap operas; I
believe that she wanted to come to America to see the programs she only knew
by radio broadcasts in the islands. It was only later, near her own death, that I
discovered, after finding her watching the Joseph Campbell PBS show (her!?)
that she had actually been spending her time living in an extensive dream world
in which she was continuing to live with her family and friends in the Bahamas.
I suspect I inherited not merely their antisocial ways but also a precocious grasp
of Jungian active fantasy, and even Corbin’s Sufi-inspired “imaginal realm.”
You can imagine the sort of dreamy, unpopular good-for-nothing this
produced. I was the sort of kid that would attend the premiere of 2001 by myself
and too young for drugs, and acquire an interest in Richard Strauss and
Nietzsche. The sort of kid that would pick up Hesse’s Steppenwolf because I
knew that was where the band had gotten its name, and then intensely identify
with Harry Haller; later, at 50, I realized that I had indeed seen my future and
become a 50-year-old misanthrope in a room full of books and cigar ash.
Your writing shows the signs of a wide and not entirely informal education.
Where did you go to school?
Of course, while I can’t account for my uniquely odd birth and parenting
(although Evola was fond of the idea that we choose our life’s course prenatally),
I also cannot explain how I arrived at the idea of attending an obscure university
in Canada; I can only assume that, growing up in Detroit, Canada, though
universally despised by its own natives, had seemed like a colorful bit of the
British Empire when visited as a child.
The school I chose had been quite a force in its little world back in the ’40s,
when Wyndham Lewis and Marshall McLuhan spent some unhappy years of
exile there (you can read about it in Lewis’s Self Condemned, a title which
should give you some idea of how backward it was even then).
And for a little-known place, my classmates have had some effect on the
world, from the actor Colm Feore, award-winning poet Phil Hall, the presidents
of Chrysler and Fiat, to the Dean of the NYU Business School. I studied religion
alongside Thomas Moore, whose popularization of archetypal psychology in The
Care of the Soul was typical of the place, and very much in my own dreamy
style; while my colleagues in philosophy included one who went on to become a
billionaire as one of the architects of the California subprime mortgage disaster.
Going to an intellectual backwater, however, was I think the best thing for me.
“Deconstruction” and other “critical theory” was only a dim rumor, and could be
grasped only as some foolish modern misunderstanding of Hegel. We were
taught—I’m speaking of philosophy, not physics or chemistry—in the grand
French Thomist tradition of Gilson and Maritain. One read original texts, and
lectures were devoted to “explication de texte,” like the English “close reading,”
not fashionable PC claptrap.
And even the younger professors who chafed at the old school trappings were
themselves useful, as they were pioneering what they called “informal logic,”
which gave me an additional training in disassembling political arguments.
Though short on “real world” facts, much better training, almost scholastic if not
Platonic, than some sociology or arts graduate today.
Intellectually, the real influence was John N. Deck, an old school Platonist, a
real “old time” Catholic, and an American who had fled to Canada during World
War II to avoid fighting what he liked to call “National, I mean, Christian
Socialism.” His combination of Neoplatonic idealism and personal eccentricity
—he wore the same cheap Sears work clothes the rest of the faculty had given
up after grad school, and shaved his head once a year, letting it grow out until he
resembled Schopenhauer; a similar figure appears, eerily enough, in Mann’s
Doctor Faustus, another book I read obsessively at the time—made a deep
appeal to me, and I became one of many disciples of this guru who taught the
most popular class on campus: a “kiddie” version of Plato called “Dream Worlds
and Real Worlds,” a two semester long harangue worthy of a more sober
Ignatius P. Reilly. Years later, I learned that an upstate New York guru was using
his one slender book as a holy text, and the group still keeps it in print to this
day.
Reading, of course. As for paid work, well, with such a background, I was no
more prepared for work than Reilly as well. I left graduate school and chose a
profession simply because the training was easy and inexpensive, and some
friends had gone the same route and actually got jobs. Eventually, in an equally
somnambulist sequence of events, I came to New York, where I plied my trade at
several major firms, until the recent economic downturn.
Again, it all comes back to Detroit in the late ’60s, early ’70s. In those days,
the FCC required radio stations to broadcast some kind of religious content, so
the local “underground” station played lectures by Alan Watts early Sunday
morning. Other than my immature reading of Nietzsche, this was my first
exposure to philosophy and mysticism, and something like his “spiritual
materialism” has remained my touchstone ever since. His autobiography, In My
Own Way, is a model for a well-lived, interesting life. By the way, Michael
Hoffman thinks his essay “Zen and the Problem of Control” in the book This Is
It, is the greatest philosophical work of the 20th century.
Watts of course was something of a Traditionalist, but he broke away for
reasons I think more of personal style than principle. Later, after absorbing a
certain amount of Thomism and Hegelianism, I found a Penguin paperback of
Guénon’s The Reign of Quantity in the college bookstore, and having seen the
name in Watts’s books tried to read it, but found it impossible to assimilate; a
combination of puzzlement over his radically different perspective on the
“metaphysics” I had been taught, and, frankly, a sense of dread and terror at his
matter-of-fact presentation of the unstoppable pulverizing and disintegration of
the universe. I can only compare it to the sense of “cosmic indifference” present
in the long, late works of Lovecraft; though less intense than in Guénon, it arises
317
from similar reasons, as I explore in my essays on James and Lovecraft.
Eventually, I was able to assimilate some of his more purely “principial”
works, such as The Symbolism of the Cross, and actually found his perspective,
or “personal equation,” as Evola would say of himself, to be muy simpatico. A
purely intellectual perspective on a world unworthy of notice anyway, was just
what my dreamy, withdrawn nature craved. Around middle age, however,
sometime after arriving in New York, I experienced something of a personal
crisis, feeling a great need for more involvement with the “real world.”
My old schoolmate Thomas Moore provided a clue, with his attempt to
translate or adapt Ficino’s Renaissance Platonism first to archetypal psychology,
then to everyday life, which I leaned to find value in as an intermediate level,
between Matter and Spirit, Dream and Real, called “Soul.” Archetypal
psychology brought me in touch with Peter Lamborn Wilson, a popularizing Sufi
scholar who made Watts seem like a Presbyterian elder, and who also, like
Watts, had his own radio show, this time on WBAI. A chance mention by Wilson
of a “happening” on the Lower East Side led me to make contact with the most
degenerate levels of the New York arts scene, perhaps the most currently well-
known and respectable survivor being the torch-singer Antony.
Archetypes, Soul, angels, the “imaginal realm” of the Sufis (and thus, through
Schuon, of the Traditionalists); reading around about these, I stumbled on the
work of Jeremy Reed, who shared my obsessions with Bowie and Brian Jones,
but also introduced me to J. G. Ballard, and above all, to the ultimate angelic
White soul, Scott Walker.
Just at the point where I might have entirely drowned in pop ephemera, I
finally made the acquaintance of the man of iron, Baron Julius Evola. His name
had never been mentioned by Watts or any Traditionalist I had read in English up
at that time, despite his long and close collaboration with Guénon. And why
should they, since he presented an entirely different perspective from theirs, and
on them? Evola was the first person I knew who neither ignored the
Traditionalists nor ridiculed them nor slavishly adhered to them, but came with a
fully-formed worldview of his own, and was more than a match for them
intellectually. Like Marx with Hegel, Evola turned Guénon upside down, as it
were, and made use of their much vaunted “principles” as a way to give form to
his nebulous ideas of the ideal civilization for Aryan man, how it had been, how
it degenerated, how it could be revived today. Evola was all about doing
something in the world, and provided an excellent antidote to Guénonian inertia.
So much for what might be called intellectual influences.
In literary terms, Rolling Stone was the biggest influence, hard as it may be to
believe today. In those days, Hunter Thompson, along with Lester Bangs from
Detroit’s rival music rag, Creem, were early and I think bad influences on my
writing and lifestyle, especially when it came to producing existential nonsense
in all-night binges in lieu of term papers. More importantly, the Stone introduced
me to David Bowie, and, through Bowie, William Burroughs, since he contrived
to be “interviewed” by Burroughs and gushed on about their “mutual”
influences. The Wild Boys had just been published (Bowie later turned it into his
Diamond Dogs epic), and I acquired the symbol for what eventually became my
blog musings.
So we have now, what—rock music, etheogens, and, courtesy of Burroughs’s
British publisher, the blurb about “pitiless hordes of adolescents in rainbow
thongs.” All clear?
Jeremy Reed revealed that the obsessive attention a fan pays to pop trivia can
be the equivalent of a poet’s heightened perception, and I try to do something
similar in looking at pop culture from a Traditionalist perspective.
But the most important influence was provided by Danny Drennan, who
published, in the early days of the Internet, a “weekly wrap-up” of Beverly Hills
90210. Drennan was the anti-Reed; having started as an obsessed fan, he grew to
hate and despise the show as only a former lover could, and was creating pages
and pages of weekly commentary, minutely chronicling the show’s idiocies, lazy
habits of writing (“So here comes the Obligatory Moment of Donna Praise”),
aging and inept actors, etc. But what was liberating was the breathless, faux
Valley Girl style, with its Homeric epithets and easy transitions from one part of
speech to another, all facilitated by the paperless, non-quantitative medium of
the Internet (“So Noah Look Away, Smirk, and Reply Hunter looks away, smirks
and replies . . .”).
This was Thompson’s mania, Burroughs’ cut-ups, Reed’s pop idolatry, taken
to a new digital synthesis, and delivered weekly with a knowing smirk. This was
how I wanted to write.
But of what?
Wasting time at work Googling various “Evola and . . .” searches, I stumbled
upon Alisdair Clarke’s blog, Aryan Futurism. Here was someone putting Evola’s
ideas to work in the modern political and social context, and in particular
attacking that great contradiction at the heart of The Right, the Judaic antipathy
to homoeroticism. The circle was completed, and I had a comprehensive
worldview, from wild boys to drugs to pop and Heavy Metal to imaginal realms
to Traditionalist metaphysics to the Aryan Männerbund to the New Right.
I also had a medium—the blog—where my Drennanesque rants could be
easily “published” and even endlessly rewritten, thus finally conforming to my
way of having a bright idea suddenly pop up, feverishly writing it down lest it
pass into oblivion, and then consigning it to oblivion by losing interest in
developing it into something publishable months later; what I liked to call my
“Nietzschean aphorisms” or “McLuhanesque probes” but really more like ADD.
If I consider my work in what Guénon liked to call “principial” terms, I would
say that I took from F. R. Leavis the importance of criticism as the application
and policing of standards; from Nietzsche the vow to only attack people as when
they serve as the vehicles of ideas significant or dangerous enough to be worth
consideration; and never the less, from both A. E. Housman and Paul
Feyerabend (a modern, yet outré enough to find his way into my school’s odd
curriculum) the taking of a gleeful interest in ripping apart those who have
publicly failed to uphold those standards yet sit back and smugly expect acclaim.
And on that note, perhaps my biggest critical “influence” is a fictional
character, Chaim Breisacher, also from Mann’s Doctor Faustus. This Judaic
“private scholar” in 1920s Munich delights in discombobulating his stuffy,
Prussian “conservative” hosts by constantly pulling the rug out from under their
haute bourgeois ideals, such as Goethe and Bach, by diagnosing their “cultural
degeneration” and finding “true” conservatism in ever more primitive,
“barbaric” forms, such as Christianity and Prophetic Judaism in favor of the
blood sacrifices of the Temple.
Some have lately speculated that he was based on a Judaic scholar known to
Evola, and, perhaps, Evola himself! I find myself in a similar position, using the
historical facts of Traditionalism to prove to “conservatives,” and even soi-disant
Traditionalists themselves, that they are hardly as “conservative” or “anti-
Liberal” as they may think; for example, using Evola to show that “family
values” is a Judaic attack on the homoerotic and entheogen-based male groups
that created Aryan civilization, or Alain Daniélou to prove that jazz is more
valid, with its “blue” notes and microtones, than “equal tempered” Western
Classical music.
Michael: That’s the great thing about the outdoors, it’s one giant toilet.
Harold: (preparing to order shoes for everyone) Feet grow as you get older.
Michael: I wish everything did.
Despite his smarmy approaches to every woman around, he is the only character to not manage to
get laid that weekend.
[←237]
Jo Beth Williams’ square, stodgy husband, played by Don Galloway—I remember thinking, hey,
it’s that guy from Ironside!—delivers the only words of wisdom in the film: no one ever said it was
supposed to be easy.
Richard: [Richard is having a late-night snack while talking to Sam and Nick]
There’s some asshole at work you have to kowtow to, and you find yourself
doing things you thought you’d never do. But you try and minimize that stuff; be
the best person you can be. But you set your priorities. And that’s the way life is.
I wonder if your friend Alex knew that. One thing’s for sure, he couldn’t live
with it. I know I shouldn’t talk; you guys knew him. But the thing is . . . no one
ever said it would be fun. At least . . . no one ever said it to me.
That’s because he didn’t have the misfortune of falling under Alex’s spell, with Alex’s fake-Zen
“ironic” non sequiturs:
His insomnia may be supposed to indicate one of those “sublimated” conditions Frankfurt
Schooled Leftists like to postulate to explain why their opponents happily ignore them, but I would
suggest it hints at a natural talent for vigils and contacting the Jungian active imagination, source of
wisdom. No one pays attention to him, of course. William Hurt’s insufferable character just walks
away when first introduced to him, and he is shipped home to Detroit to take care of the kids so that
Williams can finally sleep with, and be disappointed with, her old flame. But before he goes he both
predicts her disillusionment with Sam and hints at the essential fakeness of this group: “I can’t
believe these are the same people you’ve been talking about all these years.”
[←238]
Close in the film bears a strong resemblance to ’60s female icon Carole King—who wrote the
theme to, and appears occasionally in, The Gilmore Girls! Cringingly but all too appropriately,
King’s “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” accompanies Sarah’s decision, although, also in
keeping with the proto-SWPL atmosphere, it’s Aretha Franklin’s version—so much more earthy!
[←239]
A similar triangle occurs in the WWII German film Opfergang; see Derek Hawthorne’s
“Opfergang: Masterpiece of National Socialist Cinema,” http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/
12/opfergang-masterpiece-of-national-socialist-cinema/
[←240]
“I wonder that my very simple stratagem could deceive so old a SHIKARI,” said Holmes. “It
must be very familiar to you. Have you not tethered a young kid under a tree, lain above it with your
rifle, and waited for the bait to bring up your tiger? This empty house is my tree, and you are my
tiger. You have possibly had other guns in reserve in case there should be several tigers, or in the
unlikely supposition of your own aim failing you. These,” he pointed around, “are my other guns.
The parallel is exact.”
[←241]
See the essays mostly collected in The Eldritch Evola … & Others and Green Nazis in Space!
[←242]
The ascension of first, Chandler and Hammett, and then Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick, to the
Library of America indicates a bit of a sea change, though accompanied by the usual grumbling from
contemporary Edmund Wilsons who value bourgeois status quo rather than Tradition.
[←243]
The Eldritch Evola contains “Mike Hammer, Occult Dick: Kiss Me Deadly as a Lovecraftian
Tale,” which considers the parallels between the overly-inquisitive protagonists of detective fiction
and Lovecraft’s weird fiction.
[←244]
The Books in My Life (Charlottesville, Vir.: Hampton Roads, 1998); see Chapter 5, “Sherlock
Holmes, the Flawed Superman.”
[←245]
Symptomatic of which illness is the other new character type, the anti-Holmes, the master
criminal such as Prof. Moriarty, or fiend, such as Jack the Ripper.
[←246]
I don’t really agree with Wilson that this was some kind of evolutionary leap, “the most decisive
steps in the evolution of man since the invention of the wheel”; but certainly, after centuries of
Christian cretinizing, it was a distinct improvement.
[←247]
As well as ideologues like Tom Wolfe; see his polemical articles on the New Journalists as The
New Realists reprinted as the introduction to The New Journalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
“Believe me, there is no new journalism. It is a gimmick to say there is . . . Story telling is older than
the alphabet and that is what it is all about.”—Jimmy Breslin, quoted in Philip M. Howard, Jr., “The
New Journalism: A Nonfiction Concept of Writing,” unpublished master’s thesis, University of Utah,
August, 1971; quoted on Wikipedia, op. cit.
[←248]
I discuss the maniacal accumulation of detail as a key method in writers as different as Lovecraft,
Henry James, and Baron Evola in “The Eldritch Evola” and elsewhere in The Eldritch Evola, op. cit.
[←249]
See the remarkable analysis of Taxi Driver and Manhunter, “God’s Lonely Men: Cinema
Psychopaths” at The Niles Files, http://nilesfilmfiles.blogspot.com/2011/04/gods-lonely-men-cinema-
psychopaths.html. Here’s a sample:
More interestingly, they both have the same cinematographer, Dante Spinotti. But
whereas Red Dragon briskly moves along with its plot and suspense thriller tropes in
terms of how it uses lighting, music, editing, and sound, every element in Manhunter is
able to be savored again and again: the compositions, the colors of window blinds
behind a character, Mel Bourne’s amazing production design, the moody synthesizer
music, the highly experimental editing and sound. All this could at first be perceived as
a flaw of over-stylization; indeed, whereas The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and
Red Dragon come off as gothic horror, Manhunter feels like a cousin to the New
German Cinema of the 1970s. But this criticism is off-set by two things: Mann is totally
invested in his characters and his meticulous research reveals itself in the slightest
nuances of his performers; (even the fantastic Fiennes feels trivial and shallow when
compared to Noonan’s Dollarhyde; and Ed Norton’s Graham seems to have no struggle
whatsoever); and secondly, the aestheticism of the film is integral to the substance,
being that Francis Dollarhyde, one of cinema’s great creepy gazers, looks and then
elevates or perverts everything that he sees. Like Mark Lewis, he is a filmic cyborg and
what we see in Manhunter is filtered through a lens of complete aestheticism.
For more on the intense re-view-ability of Manhunter, see my “Essential Films … & Others,”
https://www.counter-currents.com/2015/
02/essential-films-and-others/.
[←250]
Here again, Poe was first; his detective, Dupin, already lives shut away from the Paris noise,
preferring to live by night. Other than the aesthetic veneer, on might compare such creatures to
today’s basement-dwelling video-gamers.
[←251]
Wilson later devotes a chapter to “Huysmans: The Ultimate Decadent.”
[←252]
See my review of his Aiming Higher Than Mere Civilization: How Skeptical Nihilism Will
Remind Humanity of Its Long-Forgotten Purpose (Emericus Durden Philosophy Series Book 1),
https://www.counter-currents.com/2015/05/aiming-higher-than-mere-civilization/.
[←253]
In The Hermetic Tradition, Evola discusses how the Realized Man rebuilds for himself a new,
glorified body (the Body of Light in various traditions); see Chapter 32, “The Red Work: Return to
Earth.” In his autobiography, The Path of Cinnabar, Evola explains his interest in Guénon and
Tradition as arising from the idea that the Absolute Ego that he had arrived at in his studies in
philosophical Idealism needed to be “grounded” in history, and this he identified with the historical
founders of the various Traditions, such as Manu, Solon, or the Yellow Emperor.
[←254]
Bhagavad Gita, 4.7. I discuss this avataric role in “The Babysitting Bachelor as Aryan Avatar:
Clifton Webb in Sitting Pretty, Part 2,” https://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02/the-babysitting-
bachelor-as-aryan-avatarclifton-webb-in-sitting-pretty-part-2/, as well as its relevance to the
Männerbund theme in “‘God, I’m with a heathen’: The Rebirth of the Männerbund in Brian De
Palma’s The Untouchables,” herein.
[←255]
“The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” in the last collection, His Last Bow.
[←256]
As I have frequently emphasized, unlike “moral” fiction, in genre fiction the death of a character
—especially a Big Bad who, as Trevor Lynch notes, is usually the only spokesman allowed for
Traditional, or non-PC, views—results only superficially from “just retribution” (the cover story) but
simply because there is nothing else to be done with him. “When you get the message, you hang up
the phone,” as Alan Watts liked to say. Tura Satana’s character in Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill is herself
killed at the end not because the wimpy girlfriend triumphs but because the film has to end at some
point.
[←257]
See The Spiritist Fallacy (Ghent, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2003) and Theosophy: History of a
Pseudo-Religion (Ghent, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001).
[←258]
A somewhat hostile critic calls Wilson “somewhat innocent and over-trusting, like Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle. Both Conan Doyle and Wilson gave credence to the Cottingley fairies, for example”
(https://philosophynow.org/issues/85/Colin_Wilson_As_Hydra). For his part, Wilson said:
Like Joe Cooper, I am willing to believe the girls were telling the truth. Both had had
many psychic experiences, which Joe records (and which anyone who wants to explore
further can find summarised in my son Damon’s article on fairies in our joint book
Unsolved Mysteries Past and Present). Joe’s book The Case of the Cottingley Fairies
received little publicity and is still not widely known. This has given me the opportunity
to speak of my own attitude to these things, and to explain why, like Joyce [Collin
Smith], I accept the reality of these ‘elementals’, as did the poet W. B. Yeats and his
friend Lady Gregory, and as did the writer and researcher Evans Wentz in his classic
book on the subject, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries.
(http://www.joycecollinsmith.co.uk/an-introduction-by-colin-wilson)
[←259]
Before publishing the more modest New Annotated Lovecraft we reviewed https://www.counter-
currents.com/2014/10/notes-on-the-new-annotated-h-p-lovecraft/, Leslie S. Klinger prepared The
New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, described by Wikipedia as “a series of three annotated books
edited by Leslie S. Klinger, collecting all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories and novels about
Sherlock Holmes. The books were originally published by W. W. Norton in oversized slip-cased
hardcover editions. . . . This publication of the Sherlock Holmes canon has been called ‘definitive.’”
[←260]
Sherlock Holmes: Selected Stories, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[←261]
Of course, this also reminds us of Jim Garrison’s method of “guilt by geography,” where, for
example, a “connection” is established between Lee Oswald and Guy Bannister by noting they had
offices in the same building; see Patricia Lambert’s False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s
Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: Evans & Co., 2000).
[←262]
Whether McCrea intends it or not, that word always recalls to my mind F. R. Leavis’ journal,
Scrutiny, as well as the certainly unintended “Central Scrutinizer” of Frank Zappa.
[←263]
The Ur-text is “‘God, I’m with a heathen’: The Rebirth of the Männerbund in Brian De Palma’s
The Untouchables,” herein. As the future M, Judi Dench, intones at the beginning of The Chronicles
of Riddick: “In normal times, evil would be fought with good. But in times like these, well, it should
be fought by another kind of evil.”
[←264]
See James Neill, The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies and my review-
essay thereon, available as an Amazon Kindle. Needless to say, this is all subverted by the “gay”
identity manufactured by the Left, in which marriage and family are “redefined” so as to merge the
happy homosexual in the mix: he’s just like us! As Ann Sterzinger puts it in her review of our Green
Nazis, “can you imagine William Burroughs writing about the Wild Boys with an adopted baby
strapped to his chest and a yuppie husband yapping in his ear about Glee?” (https://www.counter-
currents.com/2016/05/
fashy-homos-and-green-nazis-in-space/).
[←265]
The ethnic outsider tears down and “develops”—like Caddyshack’s Al Czervik—while the
homosexual of one’s own ethnic group reclaims and gentrifies the old; see our “This Old Gay
House,” herein. Is it not the Jew, with his “family values,” that gifted us with capitalism and its
obsessive concern with the new and the future? A concern shared by the Marxist, with his “New
Soviet Man” and the total destruction of the old order.
[←266]
Keynes is often “explained” this way: “Well, he said ‘in the long run we are all dead’ because he
was queer, you know?”
[←267]
Kingsley Amis, The James Bond Dossier (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), which I’ve frequently
called the very model of genre criticism.
[←268]
Op. cit. Trevor Lynch has noted the same essential opposition when reviewing the new Batman
vs. Superman movie:
In any matchup between Batman and Superman, I side with Batman. I’ve never liked
the character of Superman, because he is not a man at all. He’s basically a god. He’s not
a human being who has raised himself to the pinnacles of human excellence. He’s an
alien who is simply endowed with superior abilities. There is nothing heroic about
Superman, because he is almost invulnerable. He faces no risks. There’s nothing he
must struggle to overcome. Batman, however, is a true Nietzschean superman, a man
who has made himself more than a man, a man who faces injury, death, and
imprisonment night after night in order to fight evil. I don’t want to live in a godless
universe, but frankly I would prefer that we make ourselves into gods rather than find
them readymade. (https://www.counter-currents.com/2016/05/batman-v-superman-
dawn-of-justice/)
[←269]
Right-wing types who might cheer Bond/Fleming’s homophobia should note that Fleming
associates sexual deviance with “furriners” including the US. For the film version, Tilly was ret-
conned as straight, and Pussy Galore became a fantasy lipstick Lesbian who would succumb to
Bond’s charms. In the book, however, Pussy’s backstory is: ‘‘I come from the South. You know the
definition of a virgin down there? Well, it’s a girl who can run faster than her brother. In my case, I
couldn’t run as fast as my uncle. I was twelve. That’s not so good James. You ought to be able to
guess that.” As Tricia Jenkins points out, “Here, Fleming specifically implies that Pussy’s lesbianism
emerges from the familial and cultural dysfunction of the American South, and given the Bond
formula, this deviancy can only reflect the degeneracy of the United States.” See her invaluable essay
“James Bond’s ‘Pussy’ and Anglo-American Cold War Sexuality,”
http://www.the007dossier.com/007dossier/post/2014/06/04/James-Bonds-Pussy. While American
“conservatives” laud down-home Southern family values and sneer about the British queers, Fleming
sees “degeneracy” right there in the Flannery O’Connor heartland, not from “cultural Marxism” but
from the primitive conditions of the family-obsessed conservatives of the colonial world; real men
are the bachelor products of public schools, like Bond.
[←270]
The American Bond phenom’ really ran on the coat-tails (a two button, soft shouldered, single-
vented suit, of course) of the Camelot mystique, when JFK, supposed champion of “youth,” averred
to having a Fleming novel at his bedside. One wonders who was fooling whom; after all, how much
time did JFK really spend in the White House bedroom per se? “My bedroom! Where my wife
sleeps! Where my children play with their toys!”—Michael Corleone, The Godfather Part II.
[←271]
By contrast, Bond rip-offs and spoofs like the Derek Flint or Matt Helm series have their heroes
surrounded by veritable harems, the typical exaggeration of satire. I suspect any adult woman would
be immune to, and able to easy handle, or break free from, Helm’s boozy “charm.” Austin Powers’
comically frustrated satyriasis is fully in line with Fleming’s creation. On Matt Helm and other
pseudo-Bonds see Jef Costello’s “‘The Flash in the Pan’: Fascism & Fascist Insignia in the Spy
Spoofs of the 1960s” in his collection The Importance of James Bond (San Francisco: Counter-
Currents, 2017).
[←272]
Bond kills Blofeld in the book You Only Live Twice using only his own hands, an intensely up-
close, personal, one might almost say sadistically homosexual way; typically, movie Bond, having
become Roger Moore, picks up the wheelchair bound Blofeld with a helicopter and dumps him into a
factory smokestack (sexual inversion?) as he pleads “I’ll buy you a delicatessen—in stainless steel!”
Perhaps that curious line is meant as a taunt about Bond’s Judaic, middle-class mindset?
[←273]
“Dear Agent Scully; Did not appreciate your lawyer’s tone . . .” Mystery Science Theater, Episode
1010, The Final Sacrifice. “Look, he’s filed all his letters to Gillian Anderson.” Episode 1005, Blood
Waters of Dr. Z.
[←274]
Jane Bond Meets Thunderballs (Jack Remy, 1986), and various sequels. Or so I’ve heard.
[←275]
Unless, of course, we go full video-game, or virtual reality. And indeed, this isn’t the first time
Anderson has been to this rodeo. Season 7 of The X-Files brought us “First Person Shooter” by none
other than William Gibson himself, where Scully ultimately needs to enter the virtual world of a
video game to save Mulder from a rogue female warrior. Interestingly, critics regard this episode as
“legendarily bad,” while it “became one of Gillian Anderson’s favorite episodes, despite ‘its reliance
on big guns and raging testosterone.’ Anderson explained that she enjoyed the opportunity ‘to show
Scully wearing heavy metal and firing oversized weapons’” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
First_Person_Shooter_(The_X-Files)#Broadcast_and_reception). This doesn’t bode well for an
Anderson Bond.
[←276]
“The name’s not Jane Bond: why 007 can never be a woman,” The Telegraph, 25 May 2016,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/
2016/05/25/the-names-not-jane-bond-why-007-can-never-be-a-woman/. Jef Costello made similar
points about the ultimate unsuitability of a female M in his review of Skyfall, op. cit.
[←277]
The titular Skyfall is the Bond manor, I suppose.
[←278]
As the film series was “modernized” M of course became a mother figure (the last season of TV’s
The Avengers had already given us the wheelchair confined Mother), and Bond ultimately the Judaic
Daniel Craig. Book Bond is almost embarrassingly enthused about Sir Hugo Drax at the start of
Moonraker; Dr. No hosts Bond to dinner because he thinks he’s smart enough to appreciate his
status, but dismisses him as “only a stupid policeman.” Goldfinger absurdly carries Bond to
Kentucky (New York in the book) to witness Operation Grand Slam. As always, the question is: why
don’t you just kill him? Because, of course, Bond is the potential apprentice; “there are always two.”
[←279]
In the Goldfinger book, Bond is not captured so much as shanghaied, along with Tilly Masterton,
as Goldfinger’s “secretary,” which emphasizes their equivalence as protégés of the master. Male
secretaries were still common in Britain, a point leading to some comic interaction on Mad Men
between the ladies of Sterling Cooper and Lane Pryce’s male secretary when London agency PPL
takes over. In Dr. No, the book makes much of Honeychile’s muscles and “boyish behind,” leading
Cyril Connelly to ask “What on Earth was he thinking?” The Spy Who Loved Me is the only book
narrated by the Bond Girl, with results universally regarded as dire (she even gets his title wrong; as
noted above, he’s a secret agent, not a “spy”).
[←280]
Felix Leiter hardly counts; although he might be thought of as an attempt to give Bond an
American partner for the bigger US market, he is, in accord with his CIA background, a cipher; his
numerous beatings and dismemberments suggest not so much a stand-in for Bond as a sadistic figure
of fun, a Judy to the villain’s Punch; the movies have fun with him being played by a different actor
each time, in line with his nonentity.
[←281]
Jef Costello, “The Importance of James Bond,” op. cit.
[←282]
http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/05/the-courage-of-jodie-foster/
[←283]
Stefan Kanfer, Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary
Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart (New York: Knopf, 2011).
[←284]
http://tomshone.blogspot.com/2011/02/his-toughness-was-inside-
job.html
[←285]
http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/08/right-wing-anarchism/
[←286]
Paul Kengor, Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated
Progressives for a Century (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2010). See Kevin
Mooney, “Was Staunch Anti-Communist Humphrey Bogart Once a Young
Communist Dupe?,” http://netrightdaily.com/2010/10/was-staunch-anti-
communist-humphrey-bogart-once-a-young-commie-dupe/
[←287]
Claud Cockburn, Beat the Devil (Oakland, Cal.: AK Press, 2012).
[←288]
http://www.advocate.com/news/daily-news/2011/02/ 07/bacall-capote-
didnt-have-sex-bogie
[←289]
http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/09/the-dark-knight/
[←290]
Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical
Traditionalist, ed. Michael Moynihan, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vt.:
Inner Traditions, 2002), p. 261.
[←291]
Jonathan Lethem, They Live (Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2010).
[←292]
Christopher Sorrentino, Death Wish (Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2010).
[←293]
Andrea O. Letania, “How About Some Good Old Love Songs From Alleged ‘Right Wing’
Groups?” http://www. wvwnews.net/story.php?id=9536
[←294]
http://ostrovletania.blogspot.com/
[←295]
See Christopher Pankhurst’s “Music of the Future,” where David Tibet is compared to Schubert,
http:// www.counter-currents.com/2011/11/music-of-the-future/
[←296]
Mark Sedgwick, “Apoliteic Music,” http:// traditionalistblog.blogspot.com/search?q=neo-folk
[←297]
Joshua Buckley, “Euro-Paganism: One or Many?,”
http://traditionalistblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/euro-paganism-one-or-many.html
[←298]
The entheogenic researcher, not the holocaust revisionist, although the coincidence is . . .
intriguing.
[←299]
Michael Hoffman, “Mystic Allusions in Heavy Rock Lyrics,”
http://www.egodeath.com/MysticAllusions.htm
[←300]
Kevin MacDonald, “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism,”
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/WhiteEthnocentrism. pdf
[←301]
www.csmonitor.com/1990/0212/lage.html
[←302]
http://www.amazon.com/Sanctuary-20-Years-Windham-Hill/dp/B000000NLB/ref=sr_1_1?
ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1274561736&sr=8-1
[←303]
For a pro-White discussion of those elements, in the vocal context, see Julian Lee’s “The White
Voice in Rock & Pop,” http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/11/the-white-singing-voice-in-rock-
and-pop/
[←304]
http://www.amazon.com/Beauty-Rare-Thing-Complete-Recordings/dp/B00000332J/ref=sr_1_1?
ie=UTF8&s=music& qid=1274568308&sr=1-1
[←305]
James J. O’Meara, “Happy Fourth of July! Venerable Jazz Scholar Admits: Negro Musicians Had
No Sense of Swing, Had To Be Taught By Louis Armstrong,” http://jamesjomeara
.blogspot.com/2009/07/happy-fourth-of-july-venerable-jazz.html
[←306]
An echo of Spengler, who said in 1932—when you could say this in a book published by Knopf
and favorably reviewed in Time—“Jazz music and Negro dancing perform the Dead March for a
great Culture.”
[←307]
http://www.burzum.com/burzum/library/interviews/varg/
[←308]
The definite biography is still Jeremy Reed’s stalker classic, Scott Walker: Another Tear Falls
(London: Creation Books, 1998). Although outdated by Scott’s recent “rediscovery” by the hipsters,
and by no means even aware of the Aryan motifs outlined here, it nicely conveys Scott’s ability to
captivate and obsess his fans, even a man some have called England’s greatest living poet; which is
probably why the fans hate it.
[←309]
See Julius Evola. Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist, ed.
Michael Moynihan, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2002), ch. 14.
[←310]
A 2006 film by Stephen Kijak, featuring interviews with such illustrious fans as David Bowie
(who might be called Scott Lite, having chosen a series of rabidly shifting stage personae rather than
seclusion), Brian Eno who helps connect us with our New Age/Ambient theme), Marc Almond, Ute
Lemper, and Jarvis Cocker.
[←311]
http://takimag.com/article/white_noise#axzz1f3LxqV77
[←312]
Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for Aristocrats of the Soul, trans. Joscelyn
Godwin and Constance Fontana (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2003).
[←313]
Alain Daniélou, Music and the Power of Sound: The Influence of Tuning and Interval on
Consciousness (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1995; first published 1943).
[←314]
See the discussion of “bent” and “blue” notes in Julian Lee’s essay, although he fails to see their
significance as Daniélou does: “The success of African American music, with its ‘blue’ notes so alien
to equal temperament and therefore so expressive, is not due merely to fashion. It shows the need for
an understandable musical system, for logical and true intervals that can remove the veil of
inexpressive insipidity which temperament spreads over even the most impassioned movements of
the greatest symphonies” (Music and the Power of Sound, p. 16).
[←315]
Elizabeth Whitcombe, “The Mysterious German Professor,”
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Whitcombe-AdornoII.html; and Elizabeth Whitcombe,
“Adorno as Critic: Celebrating the Socially Destructive Force of Music,”
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2009/08/adorno-as-critic/
[←316]
http://www.egodeath.com/EntheogenTheoryOfReligion.htm
[←317]
http://www.counter-currents.com/author/jjomeara/
Table of Contents
Front Matter
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Dedication
Forward
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
hapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
About the Author