MISH has picked up on an important aspect of the recent job numbers that shouldn’t be overlooked. Not all sectors are shrinking…
190,000 jobs were lost in total vs. 263,000 jobs last month.
62,000 construction jobs were lost vs. 64,000 last month.
61,000 manufacturing jobs were lost vs. 51,000 last month.
Whereas,
45,000 education and health services jobs were added vs. 3,000 added last month.
Government jobs stayed steady, but, as MISH notes, “this trend is likely to reverse in a major way with as of yet unannounced son-of-stimulus and grandson-of-stimulus jobs packages.” Making stuff is out, working in hospitals and public schools is in. If the U.S. economy ever does recover, it will be changed utterly—and socialized to the hilt.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled against hanging crucifixes in Italian state classrooms, guided by considerations of “confessional neutrality”. There has been considerable protest in Italy against the decision, and in itself the uproar is somewhat encouraging. It’s important, however, to examine what was said against the ruling.
Minister of Education Maria Stella Gelmini stated rather defiantly, “No one, not even some ideologically motivated European court, will succeed in rubbing out our identity.” That’s a decent start. But another Berlusconi colleague by the name of Claudio Scajola had this to say:
“Preventing [the crucifix] from being displayed is an act of violence against the deep-seated feelings of the Italian people and all persons of goodwill.”
Scajola is correct that the ECHR decision is a willful act that can at least theoretically be enforced by the coercive machinery of the state. Yet his statement, representative of much of Italy, is based mainly on sentimentalism. Many Italians rightly take issue with the removal of symbols of their religion and culture from public life, a phenomenon accompanied by mass immigration from the Third World and the imposition of multiculturalism. Feelings, though, do not provide us with a coherent orientation for counteraction.
We who look to uphold, or more accurately, restore tradition in the beleaguered West must seek out the source of its value. Crosses in classrooms are only its most external form. A symbol can be emptied of meaning or perverted in the absence of its spiritual context. Any lasting success in the defense of Christianity in our lands will necessitate a rejuvenation of faith and its intellectual framework. The integrity of a culture and a people’s place in the universe all stem from their relation to the transcendent.
Remaining corralled within the modern pluralist mindset simply won’t do. Invoking “rights” guaranteed by a political document is a futile gesture in a rigged game. Appeals to religious freedom, as administered by the human rights regime, form a trap into which too many of the well-meaning fall. An editorial piece from L’Osservatore Romano demonstrates this quite well:
“The political world has almost unanimously testified to the lack of common sense in this ruling, reiterating that the secularization of institutions is a value quite distinct from the denial of the role of Christianity…”
In actuality the ECHR ruling shows that secularization of institutions and denial of the role of Christianity are but two closely related facets of the same campaign. The overriding goal of the Enlightenment project is to tear us away from God, to glorify man and man alone, subject only to his reason, will and passions. More specifically, the secular agenda advanced for the past few centuries has been premised upon the liquidation of Christianity and its transformation into a private matter worthy only of public ridicule.
The ultimate objective of all this is not simply to rid courtrooms and schools of the crucifix, but to erase Christ’s image in the hearts of men. Any truly effective strategy of counteraction will be rooted in spiritual resistance. No stranger to modern totalitarianism, the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin succinctly expressed the nature of this battle:
“Да будет ваш меч молитвою, и молитва ваша да будет мечом!”
- Let your sword be prayer, and your prayer be a sword!
During last year’s Republican National Convention, South Carolina GOP leaders were regularly calling in to WTMA talk radio in Charleston to provide event coverage. On the day they were supposed to talk to me, I was informed that Republican Party officials did not wish to speak to Jack Hunter. In denouncing big government and all its works, I never saw any reason to make special exceptions for Republicans and for my anti-GOP sins I had become persona non grata.
Today, everyone is denouncing big government. Since Obama’s election, tea party protests have sprung up across the country and conservatives are now rallying loud and clear against Washington spending. But liberal politicians and pundits who are calling conservative activists “crazy,” or to borrow MSNBC host Chris Matthew’s phrase “wingnuts,” have it exactly backwards. It was crazy that anyone who might claim the label “conservative” would also claim the Republican Party of George W. Bush. Conservatives haven’t lost their sanity—they’ve regained it.
In the meantime, the Left has gone completely nuts. Worshipping a president who promised “change,” liberals continue to ignore that little has. On foreign policy - the Left’s primary gripe against Bush—Obama’s war mentality is remarkably similar to his predecessor. In drawing down in Iraq, Obama has simply transferred massive US presence to Afghanistan. Controversial war on terror-era measures like the PATRIOT Act, extraordinary rendition and warrantless wiretapping remain intact. Notes observant liberal Noam Chomsky “As Obama came into office, (former Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice predicted he would follow the policies of Bush’s second term, and that is pretty much what happened, apart from a different rhetorical style.”
During the Bush years, conservatives loved to portray outspoken war protesters “Code Pink” as a perfect example of liberal wackiness. It turns out conservatives were right, but for reasons even they couldn’t have imagined, as the same Code Pink that so vehemently denounced Bush’s war in Iraq now supports Obama’s war in Afghanistan. Writes Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo:
Right on time for the somber eighth anniversary of the Afghanistan war and occupation, Code Pink founder and primary spokeswoman Medea Benjamin has announced that her organization—which made so many headlines and newscasts protesting “Bush’s war”—is now ‘rethinking’ their position on Afghanistan. A piece in the Christian Science Monitor, which Code Pink is now strenuously trying to spin, reports that the famous antiwar group is seriously amending their position after listening to the views of Afghan women.
Bush administration officials and conservative talk radio made the case time and again that the US was simply “liberating” Iraqis from the oppressive hand of Saddam Hussein. At the time, I can’t recall antiwar groups ever considering this argument, yet in supporting Obama’s war in Afghanistan, Code Pink is now using the logic of Dick Cheney and Sean Hannity to justify American military intervention in the name of human rights.
But one need not look to the far Left to find liberal lunacy. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham has quickly become the Left’s favorite Republican for both his willingness to compromise with the Democrats and his attacks on conservatives. Liberals constantly praise Graham as a “reasonable” Republican, in contrast to the rest of his party.
But if Dubya was enemy number for one for the Left, Bush Republicanism had no better proponent than Graham. Under Bush, Graham was a big government Republican in all the ways liberals admire—expanding Medicare, No Child Left Behind, TARP—but also in the one way they allegedly despise, with his unqualified support for an explicitly neoconservative foreign policy. When possible Bush successor John McCain was saying that the US might remain in Iraq for “100 years,” or after the brief skirmish between Russia and Georgia, immediately injecting the US into the situation by proclaiming that Americans “were all Georgians now,” there was Graham, always nodding his head approvingly and enthusiastically. The Left loved to portray Bush as a “warmonger.” If someone can tell me how Graham’s politics differ in the slightest from Bush and Cheney, I’d love to hear it.
Liberals who note the hypocrisy of tea partiers who now protest Obama, yet remained silent when Bush was expanding government, have a valid point. But on the one year anniversary of the last election, Obama Democrats have proven themselves no less hypocritical than Bush Republicans, particularly on the issue that most defined the Left during the last administration-foreign policy. Though few will admit it, liberals who voted for a “change” from Bush have not got it. And like the Republicans before them, Democrats’ faith in their president will likely continue to blind them to the fact that they may never get it.
Larry Auster offers a helpful digest version of the New York Times‘s coverage of the Fort Hood massacre:
A proud first generation American, born in Virginia, Nidal Hasan wanted nothing other than to serve his country. But the bigotry against Muslims that he encountered in the Army, plus the American occupation of Iraq, plus, finally, his anguish at being ordered to deploy to Iraq as part of the U.S. forces there, drove this deeply patriotic son of the Old Dominion to the point where he felt he had no choice but to launch a martydom operation against the U.S. Army and shoot down scores of his fellow soldiers.
Viva Mexico! Never mind the H1N1 or La Familia Michoacana. There’s more to Mexico than swine flu and drug trafficking, though I never realized it until I traveled to Mexico City for my cousin’s wedding last weekend. Obviously it is hard to ignore the poverty and corruption, especially when cops jack your wallet on the way down to Baja. On the other hand, people have been raving about Tulum for years, but I never much wanted to get Montezuma’s revenge twice. The first time was bad enough. Nor did I wish to end up naked on a stage in front of a thousand people like I did on spring break in 1994. Even though I won a free trip back. I guess they have a lot of wet T-shirt contests south of the border. Ten years later, I found myself skinny-dipping on a beach in Acapulco, only this time I was at another wedding, and the groom had confiscated my dress.
For one reason or another, Mexican culture has long been in my psyche. Like any good American, I’ve eaten a taco and have a story to tell about the time I drank too much tequila. Actually, I have more than one story. I love tequila. It turns me into a loud mouth vandal. But my previous experiences in Cancun, Acapulco, and Tijuana only confirmed my image of a half-baked nation of paupers without enough salt in their baby food. After 10 years in California, I can say many Mexicans are gentle, humble, and hardworking. But hell, what’s wrong with their country? So many of them are risking their lives to cross the border. Could it have something to do with the fact that every time you brush your teeth you’re glued to the can for 48 hours? Whatever is wrong with Mexico, and there is a lot wrong with Mexico, I never understood the draw. Ever since the Spanish conquered the warrior tribes that previously inhabited the region, Mexico always seemed like the runner-up.
But therein lies the irony. They were once warriors. Now, for the most part, they are passive, head-to-the-ground laborers. These are not terribly bad qualities to have. They are generally good Catholics, and what I admire most in Mexicans is their passivity. Not one of the Mexicans I hired to drive me around or that served me ever got uppity—even when I gave them cause to. And believe me, I was a demanding gringa at times. You see, despite the fact that I live in England, where patience is paramount if one is to get anything done, I am not used to life in the Third World. We forget just how lucky we are here in the U.S of A where life is relatively easy. Sure, people are struggling, and unemployment is up, but compared to those who live on the streets of the Distrito Federal, Americans are a bunch of pansies. Furthermore, corruption is bad on both side of the Rio Grande—much worse in the States when you take Wall St. into account.
What impressed me most about Mexico is the architecture. For a country with more hovels than sombreros, they have a long and magnificent architectural history. Mexicans take their building seriously. And in Mexico City, it really shows. The Museum of Anthropology is a spectacular structure. Benito Juarez airport is, too. Dozens of modern skyscrapers in the commercial district are just as spectacular as any American skyline. The historic center is quite a sight, and buildings from almost every era dot the city. Famous architects like Luis Barragan have left an indelible mark on Mexico, and almost every house I visited had a pink wall, homage to the great Barragan. Many contemporary architects are either inspired by him, or blatantly rip him off. The sense of color and variety of styles makes Mexico a visually dynamic place and a good source of inspiration for any aesthete. Mexican textiles and crafts are among the finest in the world, the food is top quality, and so are the drugs. What’s not to love?
I do have to wonder why these young women do this to themselves—make sex tapes and then try to put themselves forward into the public eye. They must know by now that in this digital age such tapes are obviously going to become public. Don’t they? Well, you would have thought so, and I would have thought so, but perhaps the thought processes of a blonde Californian would-be beauty queen are somewhat different (umm, actually, I would hope that our thought processes are indeed different: I’m assuming for example that all of us are sentient while Miss Prejean…)
There is one caveat to this wonder of course: if you’re a minor starlet with a career to promote, a movie coming out that looks like it’s going to bomb for example, then the judiciously released tape, or set of pictures deshabille, can do wonders. There is, after all, in certain circles no such thing as bad publicity as long as they spell your name right. A series of (not very nude) Megan Fox photos drifted into the public consciousness just before the release of Transformers 2 (Ms. Fox being the only conceivable reason anyone would watch the movie), just as Vanessa Hudgens was revealed to us slyly just before the release of whatever that movie she was in after High School Musical XVII was.
But for a self proclaimed strictly Christian girl like Carrie Prejean this wouldn’t be a sound career move. So what on earth was she in fact thinking?
The story has it’s fun little twists and turns. Carrie Prejean was competing in the Miss California pageant and was looking the runaway winner until Perez Hilton asked her about her views on gay marriage. Given her Christian beliefs she was agin’ it and said so. This so horrified the pageant organizers that they immediately threw her out. You can see their point of view, of course: such pageants have as their main audiences teenage boys who haven’t worked out how to unwrap a Victoria’s Secret catalogue and a larger group of the musical males amongst us who wish to gasp and bicker over the frocks.
As is usual in American life, Ms. Prejean then sued the organisers for a million dollars, a nice round sum. In one of those little twists (and please, who does write these story lines? It’s not just B list movies, but A listers would be proud to star in a movie with these sorts of plot twists) the organisers then sued Carrie Prejean. No, not for being something of an airhead, that’s part of the job description of a successful applicant, but for the return of the money they had already paid out on her. For it was revealed that they had paid for her to have a boob job before the pageant, but she hadn’t as yet paid them back. So they were suing for two nice round sums, we might say.
At this point we’re in the usual modern American legal gridlock until one of the pageant’s organizers, in the midst of negotiations, unveils his secret weapon. The Carrie Prejean Sex Tape. The existence of such a thing does not really match well with the proclaimed strictly Christian beliefs of Ms. Prejean, meaning that her argument that she had to say what she did about gay marriage because of said beliefs a difficult negotiating stance to maintain. She thus folded (rumors are that it took somewhere between five and 15 seconds, so perhaps she’s not all that dumb after all), and she’ll get her legal fees paid—but nothing else. There’s no word as yet on the disputed ownership of the other two nice round assets.
All of which really brings us back to two important questions. The first being why do these young women make these tapes? Especially those whose public persona depends upon being seen as a “good girl”? The second one comes from something that the website TMZ has reported on. The pageant officials claim to have had a copy of this tape for months, but they’ve not released it because it is, indeed, highly graphic. But they also say that Carrie should have a successful “solo career” ahead of her. What on earth do they mean?
NEW YORK—One felt the backlash against the BNP–BBC fiasco all the way to the Big Bagel, with local papers commenting on the lynching of Nick Griffin by rent-a-crowd minorities. Even people who think England is in Canada heard about it and called the freak show unfair and stage-managed, confirming the perception that Britain is a nation that has totally lost its way. Personally, I wasn’t surprised in the least. Dimbleby is a pompous clown, Jack Straw a mincing shyster of a man posing as a leader of men, and Griffin is, well, Griffin: it is the unbearable picking on the unsuitable. I particularly liked the scenes outside the BBC, where wild, hairy ethnic types with bandanas screamed abuse at the police and at everyone and no one in particular. An English friend of mine who lives over here said that outrage seems to be a very English thing nowadays. “Or what passes for English.”
I was in London and living near the Danish embassy when the cartoon controversy almost shut down half the city, and the faces shouting abuse and exhorting people to burn and murder were the same ones that were outside the Beeb last week. It is now known that Blair, Brown, Straw and the rest of the gang that hijacked Britain planned the mass immigration that has made parts of the country uninhabitable. So I ask you, who deserves to be abused by the audience, Straw or Griffin? If the BBC had not stacked the deck with a rent-a-crowd, that is.
When I read that a Saudi court had sentenced a journalist to 60 lashes after she was charged with involvement in a TV show in which a Saudi man talked about sex, my first thought was to imagine the fat, pink Dimbleby being whipped for presiding over a hate show. In fact, if and when Sharia law comes to Britain, it’ll be fun to see all those ghastly people in reality programmes being whipped non-stop by the thought police. Not that it’s much better over here. During a car-racing promo, the rhetorical question “Where is Juan Pablo Montoya” was asked. Montoya is a racing driver. “He’s out getting a taco,” quipped the analyst Bob Griese, a once-famous football (American) hero. You’d think he had insulted Martin Luther King. All hell broke loose, despite the fact that Montoya is white, employed, very rich and able to speak English. Griese had to eat more humble pie than Griffin, from the chattering classes, of course, as the Latino ones were out getting tacos and missed it.
Mind you, what Blair, Brown and Straw did to Britain the grotesque Ted Kennedy did to America way back in 1965, when he passed South African apartheid immigration laws in reverse. Kennedy lived, like Dimbleby, in ritzy, secure houses among people of his own kind. Kennedy would never dream of living among those that the laws he helped pass had brought into the country. The BBC has recast many British people as dangerous forces of hate against blacks and Muslims, but all these people want is a fair shake where traditional British values are concerned. By stage-managing a hate show last week, Dimbleby and the BBC and the ghastly Straw shot themselves in the foot and then some. They should beware of “the angry white male” theory, if there are any white males left in a future UK, that is.
Otherwise everything’s hunky dory. I see that my old friend Marc Rich has come clean in a book and admitted that he traded with the enemy and made billions in return. He would, wouldn’t he? About ten years ago, the then Spectator proprietor, Lord Black, had a fit against the poor little Greek boy when I wrote that Mossad had tipped off Rich not to fly privately to Spain because the Feds were planning to force down his plane and bring him back to justice in the States. Among some of the epithets he called me was Goebbels. Boris Johnson, then practising a much nobler profession as editor of the Speccie, defended me as best he could and I survived. Not that Lord Black wanted me fired, more likely suspended, like a naughty schoolboy caught talking in chapel. Now Taki has been justified. Once the Swiss refused to extradite him—I wonder why?—the Americans planned a snatch job by helicopter, landing in Zug, where the bum lives, but they backed off. My source is as good as it gets, and the plane job was on until Mossad, listening in on the American base in Italy, got wind of it. Poor little Taki. I almost got canned for writing the facts.
Rich is, of course, unapologetic about a life in crime, but being pardoned by a scumbag like Bill Clinton makes one, I suppose, innocent and as good as the rest of us, except much richer. Laws, after all, are there only to be respected by those without access to power or Mossad. Some readers might remember that I ran into this rat in the garage of my chalet, of all places. He was staying with my next-door neighbour and that Marie Christine of Kent woman (a nice little groupetto). I shouted at him and told him he belonged in jail. It was water off you-know-who’s back. The bum’s skin is thicker than Blair’s.
The neopagan takeover of the GOP has begun.
Village Voice
Steven Thrasher, Nov. 4 2009Holy Tyr! Queens voters made American history tonight, when they chose Dan Halloran as the nation’s first openly heathen elected official.
Halloran will serve as the City Council member from the 19th district, representing Bayside, Auburndale and part of Flushing. He and Kevin Kim were involved in a bruising campaign to the finish, which included many religious and racial fights and allegations.
Trips to both campaigns’ offices on Election Night revealed how different the two were. Shortly before the polls closed at the Kim campaign office, there was not one white person working there. Beneath a Shepard Fairey poster, a couple dozen Mandarin speaking volunteers hustled up rides to the polls on cell phones.
At Halloran HQ, there was hardly one non-white person, and the walls were adorned with ads for Tea Party protests.
And then comes my favorite two lines from the piece:
Ironically, one of the first things Halloran said when addressing his supporters after Kim conceded was “I could never have believed in my wildest dreams of the coalition we have put together.” It didn’t look like much of a diverse ‘coalition’ to us, unless you count the mix of heathens and Roman Catholics.
It’s called the “Takimag Strategy,” and apparently it can win in Queens!
(Our recent discussion of paganism and Christianity can be read here, here, and here.)
It’s worth noting that Halloran is a “King” (that is, high priest) of a New York sect of Theodism, also known as Ásatrú. No postmodern New Ager, Halloran, a former Roman Catholic, appears genuinely dedicated to re-discovering the original spirituality of Europe, and not simply embracing one more religious metaphor for egalitarianism.
So reports the website Religious Dispatches:
He received his BA from the City University of New York in History and Anthropology, and conducted archaeological field research in Ireland on the Norman and Viking periods. Like many Neopagans, who tend to read more and have higher levels of education than the average American, Halloran was drawn to the mythology and lore of ancient cultures that exposed him to an entirely different religious world than the one in which he was raised. Halloran’s particular fascination with ancient Germanic culture led him to Heathenism, a branch of contemporary Paganism devoted to the beliefs and practices of Northern European cultures.
We should learn more about Halloran before deeming him some kind of AltRight champion; however, from the little I’ve learned so far, Halloran already strikes me as infinitely more interesting then this Doug Hoffman fellow, whom the conservative movement has fetishized in the most stupid and embarrassing of ways. As I wrote yesterday, Hoffman represents less of a “conservative insurgency” then a reminder of just how widespread mainstream Republican milk-toastology actually is. Embracing Third World immigrants, promoting consumerism, and practicing fiscal responsibility by doing something as meaningless as cutting earmarks isn’t just the platform of John McCain and George Bush, but also of independent candidates who claim to run to right of the GOP. In this mild-mannered accountant, Stacy McCain and friends have appeared to have found a new guru.
Though I was unable to attend the H.L. Mencken Club event this year, I am in agreement with Jack Hunter’s latest piece where he argues that the “Alternative Right” serves itself best by focusing its efforts on reducing the size and scope of the managerial state, rather than focusing its energies on a new culture war. From my vantage point, most of the grassroots energy is focused on the issues commonly defined as “libertarian,” and thus Jack’s point about “hunting where the ducks are” is a sound one. Of course, this does not mean that cultural issues should be ignored, but as Jack notes, a successful attack on the welfare/warfare state would yield many positive results for the cultural warriors. Sadly, I am not sure the same could be said in reverse.
Take the most popular cultural issue of the day for the Right—immigration. The reason I use the general term “immigration” and not the more specific “illegal immigration,” is because like most of the major cultural battlefields of the day, the depth of opposition is nuanced and varies from person to person. I’m of the opinion that all immigration is a problem and believe simply focusing on the legal status of those entering the country is needlessly myopic.
Given this point of view, most people would classify me as a “restrictionist.” The only problem is—I don’t agree with the vast majority of proposals peddled by most self-described restrictionists. I oppose a border fence. I oppose a militarized border. I oppose a new “Operation Wetback.” I simply don’t believe any of these policies would put a serious dent in the immigration problem, nor do I believe the consequences of implementing them would be worth the minor successes they might bring.
If I say I want to “End the Fed” or “bring our troops home,” most Americans understand what I mean. If I say I want to end immigration, it isn’t exactly clear what kind of immigration I’m referring to, let alone what specific proposals I’m advocating. This general lack of clarity about many of the cultural issues of the day is yet another reason why cultural vanguardism is doomed to fail as a political strategy.
Since the sixties, conservatives and critics of the ever-emerging multicultural society have noted that politics follows culture. Some have taken this as evidence that cultural issues must be pushed to the forefront of political campaigns. I take this as evidence that the culture must be changed and politics are largely a fraud. This doesn’t mean we should abandon politics wholesale, but rather that we should do everything we can to reduce the power of the State, so that culture can become a reflection of real communities, instead of a series of multicultural edicts dictated from above by the PC police.
In the meantime encouraging irreverent attitudes toward the managerial regime is as good a strategy as any to ensure that the future is less dominated by egalitarian myths and mantras.
One of the great benefits of living in a city full of vibrant cultural diversity and hyper liberal white people is being relieved of the feeling of a civic responsibility to vote. When primaries were held here in my New York City enclave of Park Slope back in September, I took a glance at the slate of candidates and what they supposedly stood for, mostly out of curiosity, and came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to be governed by any of those damn people. I vowed never to take part in the New York electoral process. I momentarily considered voting against Bloomberg yesterday in the mayoral, just to teach that arrogant killjoy a lesson, but the race was too close, and I was afraid Bloomberg’s black liberal, Sharpton-endorsed opponent, Bill Thompson, might actually win. I surmised that abstinence was still the best policy. (Unfortunately the Constitution Party, or a similar type outfit, hasn’t made any inroads up here, which would have allowed me to have at least lodged a principled protest vote of some kind.)*
My frustration aside, it’s hard for me to summon even one cheer for the supposed nation-wide “conservative revival” I’ve been reading about perusing the right-of-center blogosphere. Robert Stacy McCain, for instance, has annoucned, “the [Doug] Hoffman congressional campaign has ignited a revolution within the Republican Party, the results of which are already being felt.” A “revolution”? Really? Let’s look at where this accountant from New York’s 23rd stands on the issues:
Health care reform
Although universal health care sounds great in theory, we can’t afford to do everything at once… especially when it means adding an additional trillion dollars to the deficit we are handing to our children and grandchildren. I believe our first step should be to bring the spiraling costs of healthcare under control so the cost of healthcare does not destroy the budgets of hardworking families and retirees. Then, as the economy picks up we can work to insure everyone.
Socialism, just not all at once.
Immigration:
There is no question that our immigration policies are flawed. The answer, though, is not to put up a wall and stop all immigration. The answer is to create an easier path for immigrants to enter the United States—and to work here—while at the same time getting tough on illegal immigrants who commit crimes.
This is a typical Republican pose in which the illegality of mass immigration is opposed, and yet the candidate expresses his desire to make it even easier for Third World migrants to enter the country.
Spending
I would cut the pork and wasteful earmarks.
Oh yes, we wouldn’t want to touch anything else. And clearly, cutting earmarks for bike trails and pet projects would make a big dint in the $70-100 trillion in unfunded liabilities that will be coming due in the next few years.
Stacy also quotes Erick Erickson of RedState.com, who claims that the Hoffman campaign “demonstrated to the GOP that it must not take conservatives for granted. … The GOP had better pay attention.” Ooh! Taken for granted no more! Well, perhaps Newt can’t count on the Tea Parties to follow his every order, as I feared might be the case. But to me, this recent episode proves just how few politicians—even ones like Hoffman, who, one would think, have absolutely nothing to lose—and professional conservatives understand the crisis we’re in, or are willing to talk about it.
Perhaps Obama has “lost the middle class” with his spending programs and inept comments about his good friend at Harvard, HL Gates (though I think it’s far too early to date the end of the white middle-class’s willingness to vote for someone like our Multiculti Messiah.) But if the Middle American Radicals have no alternative force to turn to, then their incipient rebellion at the Tea Parties and Obamacare town halls is nothing but noise.
*Why someone with my views would ever live in this city remains a mystery to many. Not too long ago, the Times did a special report on the one family in my neighborhood that dared display a McCain-Palin yard sign—the estate seemingly “as lonely an outpost as the Alamo.” And the Observer has investigated the disquieting rumor that an active Republican was a member of the renowned Food Co-op on Union St. Without question, I’m the only ones in Park Slope who’s ever made a tax-deductible donation to VDARE.com.
Scott Richert has continued the discussion about Richard Dawkins’ recent attack on the Catholic Church for its outreach to disaffected Anglicans. Of particular importance is Scott’s second piece, which argues that Dawkins’ target is Aristotle as well as Christ. For those who are interested, Scott’s first piece may be found here and his second piece may be found here.
Mad Men, the upscale drama about an early 1960s Madison Avenue advertising agency, is a sort of Brideshead Revisited for heterosexual American grown-ups. For Baby Boomers, it’s hard to watch Mad Men without enviously exclaiming: Our parents had it better!
Like the eleven-hour 1981 British adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel about the elegance and indolence of post-Great War Oxford undergrads, Mad Men’s languorous 13-hours per year pace affords viewers the time to wallow in the visual details and manners of a more adult age than our own.
Matthew Weiner, the 44-year-old creator of Mad Men, describes the root of his fascination with the post-WWII/pre-Beatles New York City that he never experienced firsthand:
Catcher in the Rye has got to be at the bottom of the entire show. It’s the first book I ever completed reading. I read it many times. I fantasized about living in New York. I loved the WASP-iness of it even though it’s got these Jewish undertones to it.
When first reading J.D. Salinger’s novel in the 1970s, I was surprised by 16-year-old Holden Caulfield’s assumption, shared by his culture in general, that it was more fun to be old than young. In contrast, as far back as I could remember—the historic hinge years of the later 1960s—the media had marketed the opposite message.
Mad Men’s cinematography is suitably mature, using a dolly-mounted camera instead of the jitter-cam of today. The serial resembles a Ralph Lauren catalog with plot twists … more plot twists than I, personally, care to follow, but there can certainly be worse things in a storyteller than a fecundity of invention.
The main plotline about a handsome fellow (played by Jon Hamm) who went off to war as Dick Whitman and returns as Don Draper is particularly old-fashioned. I suspect Weiner was inspired, ironically, by Random Harvest, the movie Holden Caulfield grumbles through at Radio City Music Hall, the one in which Ronald Colman gets amnesia from being knocked on the head on the Western Front and then starts a new life with Greer Garson under a new name.
Mad Men’s music isn’t as good as it could be if the show had a bigger budget (rights to the Sinatra catalog and Broadway standards don’t come cheap), but it’s easy to remember while watching that this was the last era when more than a few of the hit songs on the radio were composed for the over-25 demographic.
While Waugh wore his reactionary heart on his sleeve in Brideshead, Weiner maintains plausible deniability in Mad Men by methodically depicting how unenlightened the upper-middle class WASPs of a half century ago were. We in the audience are scandalized to note, for example, that even the most respectable parents in 1960 devoted more time to socializing with other adults than to obsessively overseeing their offspring’s next leap up the steep slope of the meritocratic pyramid.
Moreover, many families in 1960 can afford a home on just one income. As Betty Friedan noted, housewives are imprisoned in their suburban homes, escaping in Mad Men only, well … any time they feel like it.
Worse, firms pay married workers more than equally productive single ones, in violation of all the tenets of Friedan and Friedman. Employers back then felt they had a “duty to society,” a concept with which our advanced cultures are no longer familiar.
Even more shockingly, the employees at the Sterling Cooper ad agency knock off work right at 5:15 PM each day. They appear to have some weird Depression-era relic of a notion of solidarity among American workers: that if the bosses want more work done, they should hire more workers.
Didn’t they understand back then that cheap wages and expensive land are what made America great?
And, in contrast to today, everybody in New York wants to move to (pre-diverse) Los Angeles. Weiner, who grew up in LA (attending Harvard-Westlake, the rich kid’s high school that was my school’s archrival in debate), depicts Los Angeles in 1962 as the Paradise for the Common Man. During the second season, rich Don goes AWOL from Madison Avenue to see what it would be like to be poor Dick in LA. He discovers a low-rent utopia next to the beach where blue-collar artistes exquisitely customize cars straight out of Tom Wolfe’s famous first article. Weiner told blogger Alan Sepinwall:
… part of the point of the 60s is the focus is going to change from New York, and by 1972, New York is going to be a disaster. At this point, it’s on its way down and California is on its way up. That hot rod, read Tom Wolfe. It’s “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.
While watching Mad Men, Weiner affords us ample opportunity to congratulate ourselves on how much progress we’ve made. For example, most of the black characters in Mad Men have servile jobs. Today, of course, things are infinitely better. Black men are seldom seen in servile jobs (unless they are African immigrants or gay). In fact, black men aren’t seen in any jobs as much anymore: ten percent of black men were out of the work force in Don Draper’s 1960 versus 24 percent in booming 2000. Indeed, black men aren’t even seen at all as much anymore because a million are now locked away in prison. (The incarceration rate of black male high school dropouts was one percent in the Bad Old Days of Dwight Eisenhower’s last year in office versus 25 percent in Bill Clinton’s glorious finale.)
The kicker to the joke is that Mad Men, despite being set in New York, is filmed in LA, where Latinos have been imported in vast numbers to fill the servant jobs that today’s upper-middle class whites no longer trust blacks with. Yet Hispanics are even more invisible to the Hollywood elite today than blacks were.
Is Mad Men a satire on the old WASP-run America? Or is it, more daringly, a satire on the new America watching the old America?
Neither, really.
In setting and characters, Mad Men is a de-satirized, minor key riff on the musical comedy How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. (Indeed, Robert Morse, who won a Tony in 1962 for his role as the social-climbing young VP of Advertising in How to Succeed, plays senior partner Bertram Cooper in Mad Men).
Weiner has the fetishistic, obsessive-compulsive observational skills to be a great satirist, but his heart’s just not in it. He’s a nostalgist.
Satire, from Swift onward, has been a Tory art form. In contrast, Weiner, at least consciously, identifies with the triumph of progressive liberalism. He is the loyal son of the kind of hard-working, left-leaning Jewish family (his father is a prominent neurologist, his mother a housewife and attorney) whose conventional wisdom has come to dominate our culture so thoroughly that, at least in his copious interviews, neither Weiner nor his interviewers appear to notice many of the ironies of Mad Men.
As a social commentator, Weiner is on the winning side in the culture war. Yet, as an artist, he senses a void in the brave new America. While he may lack the vocabulary to articulate it, this longing helps give Mad Men its romantic aura that lifts it above its own soap operaish and soft porn tendencies.
Weiner, who has a wife and four sons, is at least aware, however, that he finds feminism a hoax. (This same heresy added interest to the 1980s television serial about the advertising business, thirtysomething, which was created by two otherwise liberal Jewish family men, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz.)
Consider the interview in Variety in which Weiner is asked a standard question: “How much of the show’s take on gender roles is rooted in your own upbringing as someone born in 1965?” In response, he wanders around for 867 words trying to explain, without being so lucid that gets himself Larry Summersized, that he’s learned—the hard way—that feminism is flapdoodle. In his strained verbiage, though, there’s one cogent sentence that explains much of Mad Men’s appeal to contemporary women:
“What’s sexist in the office is fuel in the bedroom.”
In his StupidParty article, Ellison failed to mention that the GOP’s new webpage is also honoring a certain misunderstood captain of industry.
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(ht: World-of-Crap)
I got a kick out of yesterday’s front page story in the New York Times on the “unexpected” profits of Ford. In particular this paragraph made me chuckle:
Ford, which earned $997 million in the third quarter and made money in North America for the first time since 2005, has turned itself around largely by cutting costs and introducing cars that consumers want to buy, rather than resorting to deep discounts to lure shoppers into showrooms.
What?!? Cutting costs? Making a product consumers want? This is how business’ are supposed to succeed? What about asking for handouts from taxpayers?
When Ford chose not to ask for government loans, the company was freed to continue spending on new products like its Fusion and Taurus sedans.
G.M. and Chrysler, by comparison, had to rein in much of their product development programs to conserve cash while they awaited federal aid.
A report by the Government Accountability Office released on Monday said that the federal government was unlikely to recover much of the $81 billion that was invested in G.M. and Chrysler, their suppliers and related financing companies.
Amazing. It turns out socializing failed companies doesn’t always pay off. Who’d have thunk it?
I see Keith Bardwell has resigned his position as Justice of the Peace down in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana. This is the fellow who, back on October 6, refused to marry a mixed-race couple (white lady, black gent).
As a defiant serial miscegenator myself, I was naturally attentive to this story. What’s one to make of it?
So far as I can judge, Mr. Bardwell was within his rights. He recused himself on conscientious grounds from performing the ceremony, as a judge is surely entitled to do. He believes that interracial marriage is harmful to the children of the union, because they will not be fully accepted by either white or black citizens. I don’t agree with that myself, and it seems to be contradicted by some rather glaring evidence; but that’s Mr. Bardwell’s opinion. I don’t see why he shouldn’t be entitled to hold it, nor indeed to act on it, so long as he harms no one. Plenty of my friends have nutty opinions (though my own are of course all rock-solid…) and I don’t hold that against them.
No harm was done here. Mr. Bradwell didn’t prevent the couple from getting married, and had no power to do so, and knew he had none. The early reporting on this was very misleading — really a disgrace to the journalistic profession. Google-News “keith bardwell license,” and you will find dozens of news stories from mid-October telling you that Mr. Bardwell had "refused to issue a marriage license" to the couple. It took me less than five minutes at the keyboard to find out that justices of the peace do not issue marriage licenses in Lousiana. That is done by clerks of the local courts. The justice only performs a ceremony and signs the license, as a priest would. Offenders here included some hig names like Associated Press, Newsweek, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and, of course, the ever-dubious Wikipedia. They have now mostly cleaned up their act, and are reporting that Mr. Bardwell merely refused to marry the couple.
(The fatuous Bobby Jindal contributed to the cloud of ignorance here, declaring that Mr. Bardwell’s license be withdrawn. Louisiana justices of the peace don’t have licenses. They are elected officials. Would it be too much to expect the governor of the state to know that? In Jindal’s case, yes.)
In a free society, there should be the widest possible room for the exercise of freedom of conscience. Mr. Bardwell’s conscience told him that he’d be doing a wrong thing if he married this couple, so he recused himself, as judges do all the time, and ought to be entitled to do. He seems to me, to judge from his TV appearances, to be a nice old geezer of—well, obviously—strong principles.
The poor guy was, of course, made the subject of a Two Minutes Hate by all the muckety-mucks of political correctness, with much shrieking and wailing about "injustice," the persistence of "racism," the "ongoing struggle," and all the rest of the threadbare clichés of the self-righteous prigs who want to tell us how to live and what to think. Senator Mary Landrieu got quite breathless with indignation, hyperventilating about how “deeply disturbed” she was by Mr. Bardwell’s “ugly bigotry.” Hands up anybody who believes Sen. Landrieu’s deep disturbedness cost her so much as a picosecond of sleep … Anybody? … Nobody? … Thank you, that’s what I thought.
Now Mr. Bardwell will likely spend the rest of his life watching his assets being transferred into the pockets of crook lawyers from legal-terrorism outfits like the ACLU and SPLC. I don’t imagine those assets amount to much. Median house price in Tangipahoa Parish is less than $200,000, though houses seem to go a tad higher in Robert, where Mr. Bardwell lives. The parish is, by the way, a Whitopia, with 1,294 whites in residence, 25 blacks, and 20 other. Now that the unfortunate inhabitants have drawn attention to themselves, and are known to have elected Mr. Bardwell to local office, any day now they should expect notification of a massive HUD lawsuit demanding they build "affordable housing."
It’s not as if opposition to miscegenenation is such an unusual thing. Without trying hard, I can think of three groups among whom quite visceral opposition is widespread: (1) East Asian men, (2) black women, (3) Orthodox Jews.
And what about our president, the sainted Barack Obama? In his autobiography he tells us about the white girlfriend he had in his New York days. At last he broke up with her.
She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and that wasn’t enough.
Dreams from My Father (p. 211)
Apparently it wasn’t enough for Obama. He left the unidentified girl to her regrettable whiteness and married Michelle. Does he perhaps nurse negative feelings about interracial marriage? Someone should ask him.
Furthermore, what we saw in this little drama was a harbinger of what we have to look forward to as homosexual marriage gradually spreads around the country. If a justice of the peace decides, on strict principle, that he cannot in conscience marry two men, or two women, will he endure the same storm of denunciation from pompous, self-righteous nitwits as Mr. Bardwell has? And what of priests, who are carrying out essentially the same function? Shall priests be permitted to recuse themselves from their duties on conscientious grounds? Not, I suspect, in Eric Holder’s America. Now just read that last question again. Priests? On conscientious grounds? Have we gone stark staring mad?
In any case, though I obviously disagree with Keith Bardwell on the miscegenation business, I cherish him as a little remnant of the old, weird America not yet hammered down flat by the forces of orthodoxy, conformity, preening priggishness, bogus indignation, and totalitarian bullying. He’s welcome to drop in to my multiracial household for a drink and a chat any day that suits him … Though by the time the guardian schoolmarms of our public morality have dragged him behind their chariots round the borders of Tangipahoa Parish with all the shyster "civil rights" lawyers of America in howling pursuit, briefcases a-flapping, I doubt he’ll be able to afford the bus fare up here.
Feminism is a Darwinian blind alley. In biological terms, there is nothing that identifies a maladaptive pattern so quickly as a below-replacement level of reproduction; an immediate consequence of feminism is what appears to be an irreversible decline in the birth rate. Nations pursue feminist policies at their peril.
It’s no secret that Western man has given up breeding. A society needs to have 2.1 births per women in a lifetime if it’s going to maintain a steady population. Besides the U.S. and Iceland, no western nation is even close.
Putting the problem in chart form may help to illustrate its enormity. Here are some of the fertility rates for western countries and their projected white populations by 2050, not counting migration. I estimated 4.9 million nonwhites for the UK and knocked that out of the population, 6.4 in France, 1.7 in the Netherlands, 2.5 in Germany, and 10 million for all other EU countries. The total EU white population is 491.5 million- 25.5 million nonwhites = 466 million. Also, the TFR was adjusted from the official number of 1.51 to 1.45 due to the higher nonwhite birth rate. Canada has around 2.7 million nonwhites. Their overall TFR is 1.58; I estimated the white number at 1.5. Russia is about 20 percent nonwhite.
^EU member
*ex Soviet state, non EU member
It can be projected that the total number of white people lost from the EU, Canada, Switzerland, the Balkans, Norway and the ex-Soviet states including Russia will be around 279,000,000. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the losses due to World War I, World War II, the Nazi regime and all communist governments in history combined. Of course, deciding against having children is not equivalent to starving people in gulags. Still, whatever the causes of the birth slump, the result is hundreds of millions of lives not existing that otherwise would have.
Perhaps low birth rates are not a cultural phenomenon and the number of children people have is based more on economic considerations. Looking at birth rates for the world as a whole casts doubt on that possibility. The top five countries are Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Niger and Afghanistan. Not exactly places known for their prosperous middle-classes. Even within first-world countries, if there’s a correlation between wealth and fertility, it’s negative. In the U.S., black and Hispanic households are worth about one tenth of what white household are. But according to estimates, Hispanic women have 3.0 children each, blacks 2.2, and whites 2.0. Ukraine’s nominal GDP per capita is less than $4,000 a year while its TFR is indistinguishable from that of Italy ($39,000), Spain ($35,000) or the Czech Republic ($21,000).
We must conclude that there is something besides economics that is going on here. If you find a white population somewhere, it’s almost certain that it’s not going to be reproducing itself enough to survive.
There is one major exception.
After the 2004 presidential election, Steve Sailer famously analyzed Caucasian fertility rates in Red (those that voted for the Republican candidate) and Blue (those that voted Democratic) states. He found that the top 19 states in fertility (and 25 out of the top 26) voted for George W. Bush. Amongst the 50 states and Washington, DC, the correlation between white fertility rate and the Republican share of the white vote was 0.86 (0.84 in 2000).
Sailer hypothesizes that the lower cost of living in Red States makes child bearing more feasible.
In a tempting contrast, the cost-of-living calculator provided by Realtor.com says that a $100,000 salary in liberal Manhattan buys only as much as a $38,000 salary in conservative Pinehurst, North Carolina. Likewise, a San Francisco couple earning $100,000 between them can afford just as much in Cedar City, Utah, if the husband can find a $44,000-a-year job—and then the wife can stay home with their children. Moreover, the culture of Cedar City is more conducive to child rearing than San Francisco.
While this kind of thinking is on the right track, it doesn’t address why some women choose carriers and others families as much as it does why those with particular characteristics end up in one place rather than another. After all, those from New York are free to move to Idaho and vice versa. But it does show that we’re dealing with a cultural issue—one of the soul, not the pocketbook. Utah, the only majority Mormon state in the Union, has a 2.45 TFR. That’s pretty impressive, especially considering Utahans watch the same TV and listen to the same music (both of which encourage libertinism and nihilism) as the rest of America. While cost of living considerations may explain some of the difference in TFR between New York and Utah, they do less to shed light on the disparity between Utah and the rest on the socially conservative and sparsely populated heartland.
Taking an international perspective, there seems to be two ways to have a replacement fertility rate in the modern world.
A) Be really religious.
B) Be really r-selected.
Since Europeans aren’t Africans, that leaves option (A) as the only proven method for replacement Caucasian fertility. The potential success in this area of any secular philosophical system is speculative. Remember that next time you see Bill Maher on TV foaming at the mouth about those stupid Christians who won’t bow before the god of evolution. The ultimate irony is that championing Darwinism has, as Katarina Runske wrote of feminism, been a Darwinian dead end.
Put bluntly, liberal secular humanists are on the verge of extinction.
To get an idea of the cluelessness of the evangelical Darwinians, look not further than Richard Dawkins’s recent article “What Use is Religion?” The author begins by distinguishing between proximate and ultimate causes. To get an idea of what he’s talking about, think of a moth that flies into a lamp and kills itself. The proximate cause is that the physiology of the insect and physical properties of light cause the moth to behave in a suicidal way. An ultimate cause is evolutionary: in the conditions in which the insect evolved, the only light in the night sky was the moon, which the moth was able to use as a compass without ever running into it.
Saying we believe in religion because it feels good is a proximate explanation, the same way that saying we eat sugary foods because they taste good is. The evolutionary “why” just isn’t there.
Dawkins’ answer to “what use is religion?” has something to do with children, but nothing to do with the likelihood of having them.
My specific hypothesis of the necessity of religion is all about children.
More than any other species, we survive by the accumulated experience of previous generations. Theoretically, children might learn from experience not to swim in crocodile-infested waters. But to say the least, the child whose brain includes this rule of thumb will be at a selective advantage: Believe whatever the grown-ups tell you. Natural selection builds child brains just this way.
In addition, this very quality automatically makes them vulnerable to infection by mind viruses. For excellent survival reasons, child brains trusts parents and elders whom their parents tell them to trust. An automatic consequence is that the “truster” has no way of distinguishing good advice from bad. The child cannot tell that “If you swim in the river, you’ll be eaten by crocodiles” is good advice but “If you don’t sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, the crops will fail” is bad (or at least, unnecessary) advice.
Dawkins compares religion to an Internet virus in this way. A good computer does what you tell it. That makes it a wonderful machine capable of doing spreadsheets, but also likely to follow harmful instructions. To Dawkins, religion is a late arriver like the artificial light which kills the moth that is behaving in ways that in other conditions were evolutionarily adaptive.
The problem with using that explanation for religion is that spirituality has been around for too long. There has been plenty of time for evolution to preserve the positive results of blind obedience and do away with what’s harmful and wasteful. For similar reasons, Harpending and Cochran theorize in The 10,000 Year Explosion
Since man’s been talking a lot longer than he’s been writing, it’s hard to date the birth spirituality or belief in life after death. As good a guess as any for the start of religion is when humans started taking the trouble to ceremoniously bury their dead. That’s been happening for at least 100,000 years. We may trace spirituality even further. OriginsNet.org has put together the evidence for religiosity in the great apes in their “Appendices for Chimp Spirituality.” As the article recounts, after a 10-year old female bonobo was killed by a leopard, the tribal elders encircled the body almost immediately, some making loud displays and calls, others sitting in solemn silence. The body was eventually groomed and cared for, and the high-status apes wouldn’t allow any other apes access to the body. Surely if these alpha apes could talk, they would’ve declared themselves a priesthood and said they were praying for the poor child’s soul!
There’s also evidence that animism and a certain reverence for nature has a very long lineage. Jane Goodall observered that at the onset of thunderstorms, chimpanzee males would often perform spectacular aggression displays, charging, swaying back and forth, and brandishing and shaking branches. Goodall sensed that the Chimpanzees were expressing something like the emotion of awe.
Religion may have evolved to protect us from slipping into hedonism, or to instill a sense of duty in order to go bear the difficulties of childbearing. It may simply be that those who thought God was on their side exterminated the prissy atheist cavemen (who probably also believed their women should be “liberated” and hunt for themselves.) The issues of the evolution of religion and exactly why it’s good for the fertility rate in the modern world are outside the scope of the article. There isn’t even an established theory on the evolution of the brain yet. (I’m partial to Geoffrey Miller’s belief that it has something to do with sexual selection, but I wouldn’t bet a week’s salary on it.)
What we can say with certainty is that Dawkins’s idea that religion brings nothing to man, or, indeed, harms him, is patently false, whether we see things from the perspective of how long faith has been around or what’s happening today to people without it. A quick look at the CIA Factbook proves that Dawkins is very wrong when he claims, “religion has no survival value for individual human beings, or for the benefit of their genes.” If, in the end, all evolution cares about is survival, it’s liberalism that must be considered the virus. Our ancestors who had religion survived while those of us without it might not.
The two most evolutionarily successful men in written history were probably Genghis Khan and the Prophet Muhammad. But only the latter invented a religious justification for his conquests. Now his ethny (loosely defined) continues to claim land while the Mongolians are a measly five million and dwindling. Among whites, the two most fertile groups are by far the mentioned Mormons and the Anabaptists. Though the Old Testament ignores the afterlife, the Hebrews’ great reward for pleasing God was that the they could spread their genes. Millennia later, God’s chosen are still around, while the Canaanites exist only in word.
There may be nothing we can do to stop the current trends. Whites may simply not be fit for the world they created. Perhaps the few that are have already become religious fanatics and simply need time to expand their numbers. We won’t know until there’s a white elite that doesn’t declare war on the traditional beliefs of their people. Russia may be providing a test case (albeit not a perfect one. The government may have started to encourage nationalism and religion, but there’s still the poisonous effects of the Western-American media).
Even if it was granted that the modern world, with its feminism and secularism, produced all the happiness one can imagine, it cannot last. A baby born today may live to see the extinction of the Lithuanians (projected to be a population of 760,000 by 2100, possibly all assimilated into other ethnicities). Any philosophy that guarantees that those that adopt it will be gone within a few generations can only be embraced by nihilists. The patriarchal and god-fearing will inherit the earth, one way or another.
Long before I supported Ron Paul for president and in general, I was a staunch Pat Buchanan conservative. I still am. Giving my opinion on the radio and in print, at least twice a week for over a decade, I’ve been called a libertarian or a conservative depending on the issue being discussed, but more importantly, the political figures associated with those discussions. If arguing my opposition to NAFTA, illegal immigration and American empire in 2000, I was derided as a Buchananite-nationalist-isolationist. If arguing against NAFTA, illegal immigration and American empire in 2008, I was derided as a Paulite-libertarian-isolationist. I plead guilty on all counts.
Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the 2nd annual HL Mencken Club conference where a host of conservative and libertarian thinkers came together for a rousing exchange of ideas on what might—and what should—animate the American Right. One, surely ongoing, debate seemed to be whether right-wingers could make more progress by focusing on cultural issues like illegal immigration, multiculturalism and affirmative action or libertarian issues like government size, spending and perhaps, civil liberties. Would a more culture-minded Buchananite approach work best? Or perhaps a more libertarian-minded Paulite approach?
What many are now calling, appropriately and accurately enough, the “Alternative Right” encompasses both the Buchanan and Paul camps, and whatever differences each have are miniscule compared to their shared, stark differences with the liberal Left and mainstream neoconservative Right. Before discussing what should be done to advance Alternative Right causes—why not look at what has already been done?
The two most successful, right-wing grassroots uprisings in recent years have been the backlash to amnesty for illegal aliens in 2007 and the ongoing “tea party” protests against government spending. Buchanan’s position on illegal immigration in 1996—something only he talked about back then and the GOP viciously attacked him for—is now conventional conservative consensus.
Whether born of partisanship or principle, the thousands of Americans protesting government spending at tea party rallies has radicalized the Republican Party’s natural base. When criticizing talk radio, liberals tend to believe the small, “angry” percentage who actually call-in, unquestionably represent the millions who listen—yet contradictorily assure respectable folks that these crazy “teabaggers” are but a small, vocal few. Sensing their influence and power, the GOP establishment pays anti-government protesters lip service, but to their credit, the tea partiers are not necessarily paying anything back. Notes the Wall Street Journal “the tea-party movement appears aggressively nonpartisan, much like Ross Perot’s supporters in 1992.”
So what happened to all those crazy Ron Paul kids during the election, waving protest signs and screaming about big government? Many of their parents have joined them.
If Paul had been elected president and carried through on campaign promises to secure the border, end “anchor baby” citizenship,” dismantle government programs like affirmative action, welfare, race-based housing loans and the like, the Texas Congressman would be portrayed by the Left as one of the most racist presidents in modern history. Just for following the Constitution.
But while the Left—including most of the GOP leadership—would shriek, the real Right, the Alternative Right, would applaud. While the GOP keeps scratching its head wondering how to attract more minorities and young people, ironically the only Republican who has attracted both is Paul, and his anti-statist message is feasibly more acceptable to the wider, mostly white, tea partying GOP base, primarily because it is anti-state, not anti-minority. Simply put, the libertarian approach—per Paul’s example—is the model that could build the broadest coalitions and bear the most fruit in advancing Alt Right policies.
In 1996, I thought libertarians who abandoned Buchanan—the only presidential candidate serious about rolling back American empire—were damned fools. A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll published this week shows that Americans’ trust in government is at a 12-year-low and over half the country supports the formation of a third party. Fed up with George W. Bush-style “compassionate conservatism” and already souring on Obama’s “change,” what organized, anti-government, anti-establishment philosophy exists that might attract disenchanted voters who could challenge the status quo of both parties? In 1996, it was unquestionably the Buchanan Brigades.
In 2009, it is Ron Paul libertarianism. The reason I talk about Paul so much is because Paul has accomplished so much, creating an intellectually serious grassroots fervor that I hadn’t seen since Buchanan in 96, only younger, more enduring and with broader appeal. And today, and in any era, the cultural and constitutional wings of the Alternative Right would gain far more by hunting where the ducks are than trying to invent a brand new bird.
When America is about to throw an ally to the wolves, we follow an established ritual. We discover that the man we supported was never really morally fit to be a friend or partner of the United States.
When Chiang Kai-shek, who fought the Japanese for four years before Pearl Harbor, began losing to Mao’s Communists, we did not blame ourselves for being a faithless ally, we blamed him. He was incompetent; he was corrupt.
We did not lose China. He did.
When Buddhist monks began immolating themselves in South Vietnam, the cry went up: President Diem, once hailed as the “George Washington of his country,” was a dictator, a Catholic autocrat in a Buddhist nation, who had lost touch with his people.
And so, word went out from the White House to the generals. Get rid of Diem, and you get his power and U.S. support. Three weeks before JFK was assassinated, Diem and his brother met the same fate.
When the establishment wished to be rid of a war into which it had plunged this country, suddenly it was “the corrupt and dictatorial Thieu-Ky regime” in Saigon that was simply not worth defending.
Lon Nol, our man in Phnom Penh, got the same treatment.
“In this world it is often dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, but to be a friend is fatal,” said Henry Kissinger.
The army of South Vietnam and the Saigon government, the boat people of the South China Sea and the million victims of Pol Pot’s genocide can testify to that before the judgment seat of history
Thus the daily attacks on Afghan President Hamid Karzai—who sat beside Laura Bush as guest of honor at the 2002 State of the Union and got a standing ovation—as the corrupt ruler of a corrupt regime, whose brother, a narcotics trafficker, has been on the CIA’s payroll, seems a signal that the ritual is about to begin. The Karzai brothers should probably read up on the fate of the Diem brothers.
Yet never has an ally been more egregiously insulted in wartime than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s insulting of the Pakistanis on her “fence-mending” trip last week. In a meeting with editors, Hillary was asked why the United States was focusing its Predator strikes in the war on terror so heavily upon Pakistan.
Said Hillary, “Al-Qaida has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002. ... I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to.”
This is charging the Pakistani government, army and intelligence services with cowardice or collusion with bin Laden and al-Qaida in the war on terror. That it was made within hours of the bloodiest in a long series of terror attacks that have killed hundreds of Pakistanis only magnifies the insult.
So, too, does the fact that the Pakistani army, after cleansing the Swat Valley of the Taliban, is now fighting in South Waziristan in the most critical battle of the war.
But, if this is what the Obama administration and the Congress believe, why are they sending $7.5 billion in new aid to such a regime?
Moreover, the charge is, on its face, demonstrably false.
If Pakistan’s intelligence services, army and government all knew the exact location of bin Laden, we would know it. For we have people inside sympathetic to us, just as some are sympathetic to al-Qaida.
And if people inside discovered the exact location of bin Laden or al-Qaida, they would leak it to us, if only because the money on the table for such intelligence is irresistible.
Is Secretary Clinton suggesting there are people throughout the Pakistani government who have information that could make them rich for life, but refuse to reveal it out of purest loyalty to a gang of terrorists who are massacring their countrymen as well as Americans?
That there are warlords who are war criminals, allied with the Afghan regime and us, that drug-traffickers are abetted by high officials, that Karzai stole the election, no one denies.
That the Pakistani intelligence services are shot through with elements loyal to a Taliban they helped bring to power in Kabul, that there are Pakistani army officers who believe they should be defending their country against India, not fighting America’s war in Waziristan, is also undeniable.
But what does it avail us to insult these people who have cast their lot with us, many of whom will, with famines and friends, pay a far more terrible price than we if we lose these wars.
And if we are going to abandon these people, as we have so many others in the past, let us at least tell them, and ourselves, the truth. We didn’t know what we were getting into. We don’t have the stomach for a long war. We’re sorry we got you into this. Your big mistake was in trusting us. You folks should have known better.
Friday’s New York Times had a report on the rent-a-bike system the city of Paris has been operating since 2007. For about $1.50, a Parisian can pick up a bicycle for half an hour from any of hundreds of unmanned rental stations and return it to any other station. Like other cities with similar systems—Oslo, Stockholm, Vienna, Luxembourg, Milan—Paris is preening itself on having gotten people out of cars and onto bikes.
Alas, the people who set up what’s known as the Vélib’ system forgot that Paris is not all yuppies and tourists. Certain Parisians, for example, burn cars for sport. July 14th, Bastille Day, is a favorite day for it, and this year, despite stepped-up patrols and 240 arrests, immigrant “youths” reduced 317 cars to cinders—a new record. New Year’s Eve is another time for burnt offerings, and the national total in January was 1,147—a few percent off the all-time record but still up by eight percent.
With even just a few of these “youth” about, you can be sure that sturdy, $3,500 bicycles that you can rent with the swipe of a stolen credit card are not always going to come back. About 40 percent of the initial fleet of 20,600 bikes have been stolen and another 40 percent have been burned or busted beyond repair. Bikes are showing up in Eastern Europe and even back home in North Africa, and the company that operates Vélib’ has to fix 1,500 smashed up bikes every day.
No one even pretends not to know who is doing the smashing. Bruno Marzloff, reported to be a sociologist of transportation, concedes that most of the thieves and vandals are angry African immigrants. “It is an outcry, a form of rebellion; this violence is not gratuitous,” he says. It’s no doubt all in the spirit of that favorite graffito of the immigrant suburbs, Nique la France (Fuck France).
The Times story especially struck me because just the night before, I had been talking about bicycles with a charming lady who spends half the year in northern Montana. She told me that outside town she finds collections of unlocked bicycles at school bus stops. Children drop them off in the morning after they have ridden from home to take the bus, and their bikes will still be there when the children get off the bus to ride home in the afternoon.
Why does what works in Montana not work in Paris? Aren’t all people everywhere the same? No doubt Mr. Marzloff, sociologist of transportation, could explain it to me.
In my last piece at Taki’s Magazine, I discussed the unprecedented phenomenon of a few Republican Party pollsters and strategists admitting, most times begrudgingly, that winning more White votes might be more effective than pandering to minorities (That is, they’ve awaken to what VDARE.com has called “The Sailer Strategy.”)
The backlash of White voters against Gatesgate put Obama’s approval ratings into a freefall. A few Republicans realized this, and it looked like the Stupid Party’s IQ might breach room temperature. Obama & Co. gave Whites even more reasons to oppose him with the Van Jones and ACORN scandals.
The President’s ratings are down 25% since April—the biggest drop in over fifty years. Even White Democrats are jumping ship. Healthcare, the economy, and the War are the main factors behind Obama’s plummeting ratings, but no one denies that Gatesgate spurred the decline and that many white who voted for Obama might be suspecting that their candidate might not be so “post-racial” after all. (The faltering economy and Afghanistan is not hurting Obama among blacks.)
Republicans are expected to reap the benefits of his unpopularity in the coming days. Democrats have all but given up on retaining the Governorship in Virginia and they are likely to lose in Blue New Jersey. This is in large part due to projected low black turnout. According to the Washington Times,
Voter doldrums—especially among blacks far less energized than they were for Barack Obama’s historic presidential bid last year—pose problems for Democrats struggling in the governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey.
Pollsters and election analysts expect a steep drop-off of black voters—who historically back Democrats—in the nation’s two gubernatorial contests and in congressional races Nov. 3, and they predict it is likely to cast a shadow in 2010 over at least 10 House Democrats with large black constituencies.
So with the increased White anger towards Obama and low Black turnout turning blue and purple states red, what is the Republican Party’s new strategy?
It’s decided to return to the tried-and-true strategy of pandering to minorities!
Well, at least things are back to normal with the Stupid Party.
The most craven and humorous example f this can be found is the redesigned GOP.com, the official website for the Republican National Committee. The Republicans’ uncool stationwagon of a website has gotten a “Hip Hop Makeover” and been transformed into the pimped-out ride the party needs to achieve victory. Originally, Michael Steele had a blog on the site called “What Up?” (but apparently this title became too embarrassing, even to groveling Republicans, and was replaced with the less jiggy “change the game.”)
The “O” in GOP has given way to a picture of a smiling Republican face that changes everytime you refresh the site. Sometimes the surfacing visages are “heroes” and other times they are just random under-35 Republicans who are the New Face of the GOP. Get it? There is even a GOP “faces” application on the site in addition to a RNC Facebook page.
In an unofficial study, I refreshed the site over and over to see what the hue of the face of GOP might be. There were not a large variety of faces, as many showed up four or even five times before I made it to 15 (excluding heroes.) According to my count, there were three black males, three black females, one hispanic female, one hispanic male, five white females (who, to their credit, were generally attractive), and a grand total of two white males.
In contrast, when I went to the “GOP faces” section of the website, there were only four blacks, two people who may have been Hispanic, and 54 whites in the one page I looked at. But these faces were handpicked, of course. Continuing my next unscientific test, I went to the official RNC Facebook page and looked at the first sixty people who signed up as “fans” of the Republican National Committee: 58 were white, one was Hispanic, and one was Asian. None were black!
That’s the young Republican Party base of 2009.
According to GOP.com’s version of GOP history, this is a departure from the GOP of yesteryear, which was dominated by women and minorities.
GOP.com prominently features s a Patriots: American Heroes and Famous Republicans section to showcase the fact the “the Republican Party has a rich history of men and women who fought for freedom and equality.
This is just a sample of the many historical heroes who have long since gone but left a lasting impression on the Party, the country, and the world. The current leadership is committed to continuing these traditions and making sure that today’s Republicans know their past so they can draw from it for future success. Who will be the next member of the Republican Party to achieve greatness?
Who are these Heroes and Famous Persons? Of the 18 people currently listed, we can divide them into three categories. Four are well known women and minorities: Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Jackie Robinson, and Clara Barton. Nine are not so famous women and minorities—usually Reconstruction politicians who were only elected by disenfranchising Whites: Pinckney Pinchback, Jose Celso Barbosa, Joseph Rainey, Octavius Catto, Hiram Revels, Edward Brooke (maybe a few people know who he is), John Langston, Ellen Foster, and Mary Terrell. Only five are White males: Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower, Everett Dirksen, Frank Johnson, and Ronald Reagan. Compare this to, I don’t know, the Founding Fathers who were all white males.
Of these various minorities and women, there are a few fun facts:
John Langston is supposedly a great Republican because the Communist Langston Hughes was named after him.
Edward Brooke—the only African American or Female Politician they mention from the last 80 years, co-sponsored a number of Great Society bills and fought against attempts to defund much of the Great Society.
José_Celso_Barbosa is known as “The father of the Statehood for Puerto Rico movement.” Presumably if Puerto Ricans knew this and we gave them statehood, they would all vote Republican.
Jackie Robinson, it turns out, wasn’t a Republican, but a self-described independent who supported Nixon in 1960 and Rockerfeller in 1964. However, when Barry Godwater received the presidential nomination over Rockerfeller, Robinson wrote in his autobiography:
That convention was one of the most unforgettable and frightening experiences of my life. The hatred I saw was unique to me because it was hatred directed against a white man. It embodied a revulsion for all he stood for, including his enlightened attitude towards black people. A new breed of Republicans had taken over the GOP. As I watched this steamroller operation in San Francisco, I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.
Barry Goldwater—who integrated his own department store and the Phoenix Air National Guard, in addition to building the modern Republican Party by bringing all those terrible Southern Democrats into the GOP—is not listed as hero. Other Republicans unmentionables include Robert Taft, Teddy Roosevelt, Jesse Helms, and Calvin Coolidge.
What about those five white Males? Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan are all obvious choices, but who is Frank Johnson? He was a liberal Judge who ruled in NAACP vs. Gotthard that Alabama hire one black state trooper for every white they hired until the percentage of black troopers matched the black population of a state. This precedent was used to impose quotas across the country. Though a Republican, Jimmy Carter nominated him as head of the FBI and Bill Clinton gave him a Medal of Freedom.
More insultingly, GOP.com reduces the careers to Dirksen and Eisenhower to their record on civil rights. The only highlights in Dirksen’s career they list are his support of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act—which led to quotas and gerrymandering respectively.
The site does not even mention that Eisenhower commanded the Allied forces in World War II, but merely states, “His administration opposed the Democrats’ segregationist policies.
President Eisenhower appointed to the federal bench southern Republicans such as Frank Johnson, John Wisdom, and Elbert Tuttle, who would become civil rights champions. The day after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, President Eisenhower ordered public schools in Washington, D.C. desegregated immediately, not waiting for judges to make “all deliberate speed.” He sent troops to Little Rock to force the Democrat governor in Arkansas to obey a federal court order to racially integrate the public schools.
For some reason it does not say that Eisenhower said that his appointment of liberal justices Warren and Brennan were his “two biggest mistakes.” According to Warren, Eisenhower told him prior to Brown, “These [Southerners] are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit alongside some big overgrown Negroes.”
Opposing activist judges like the ones Eisenhower regrettably nominated continues to elect Republicans to this day. In fact “Courts”—unlike immigration or affirmative action—are one of the six defining issues for the Party on GOP.com.
How about Lincoln? Nowhere does GOP.com even mention that he saved the Union and won the Civil War—or for that matter that he believed he had, “no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races.” Instead, his accomplishments are reduced to his support for the abolition of Slavery.
Save Ronald Reagan, the only heroic Republicans are ones who base their career solely on uplifting African Americans.
The new GOP.com also provides an extended timeline of the Republican Party’s greatest accomplishments. Below are every single of one of the Party’s pre-1960 actions:
Republicans Established the Transcontinental Railroad
Republicans Passed the Land-Grant College Act
The Highest Point in Washington, DC [This refers to the addition of the Freedom Statue atop the Capital, however, they somehow made this entry about the Emancipation of Slavery in DC]
The First Hispanic Governor was a Republican Republicans Freed the Slaves
Republicans Passed the 14th Amendment
Republicans Established the Buffalo Soldiers
Republicans Established Howard University
Memorial DayRepublicans Passed the 15th Amendment
Republican Opposition to Plessy v. Ferguson
The First African-American Senator was a Republican
Republicans Outlawed the Ku Klux Klan
Yellowstone National Park
Republicans Passed the 1875 Civil Rights Act
A Republican Wrote the 19th Amendment
A Former Slave Chaired the 1884 Republican National Convention
First Women Mayors in the United States
A Republican President Appointed the First Jewish Cabinet Secretary [Only true, if you exclude Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin]
Republicans Passed the Indian Citizenship Act
The First Hispanic U.S. Senator was a Republican
The First Asian-American U.S. Senator was a Republican
The Republican Party First Called for Ending Racial Segregation in the Military
A Republican Integrated the University of Mississippi
A Republican Wrote the Brown v. Board of Education decision [Again, Earl Warren, the first Judicial Activist]
Republicans Established the Federal Highway System
Republicans Passed the 1957 Civil Rights Act
Republicans Ended Racial Segregation in Little Rock.
So, of the Republicans 28 greatest accomplishments during its first 100 years, only five do not involve helping women or minorities.
Trust Busting? Peaceful resolution of the Korean War? The Taft-Hartley Act—or for that matter, the 1924 Immigration Act? All are deemed unimportant.
Interestingly enough, just as none of the post-1960 Republican heroes are minorities, none of the nine post-1957 accomplishments of the GOP involved uplifting blacks?
What happened? Those evil Southern Democrats, whom the GOP.com derides, started voting for the GOP because they were fed up with the increasingly liberal Democrats. Beginning with the Dixiecrat walk out to support Strom Thurmond—who later became a Republican—in 1948, the South slowly left the Democrats and eventually voted en bloc for Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.
In fact, many major Southern Democratic politicians—starting with Thurmond but continuing on through Mills E. Godwin, Jesse Helms, Phil Graham, Richard Shelby, and Virgil Goode—switched parties.
If someone attended the Five Minutes University on postwar electoral politics, the lesson would be: “Southerners voted Democratic. Blacks voted Republican. They switched parties.”
If they spent a few more minutes, they’d learn that because Southerners and then working class ethnic whites who were upset with the left wing racial, feminist, and cultural policies left the Democratic Party, the New Deal Coalition that kept the GOP out of power for nearly forty years collapsed and the Republicans dominated politics from 1968 until the election of Obama.
In the process, the GOP became less attractive to minorities, while the Democrats became the party of Willie Horton and Jeremiah Wright.
It’s doubtful many African-Americans and liberals will react to GOP.com’s shocking revelation that the Democrats used to support segregation by bemoaning how racist their party used to be, nor are they likely to switch parties due to just how enlightened the GOP’s racial policies of 1872 were.
Instead, they’ll respond quite sensibly by pointing out that none of these black and liberal Republicans would be Republicans today. Besides, all of America was evil and racist until it was redeemed by in the 1960s. Why should anyone care if the Democrats were politically incorrect before then?
This whole GOP.com exercise proves nothing except how desperately the GOP is trying to avoid being tagged the White Male Party—that is the party of the people who founded and built this country. Through his sheer incompetence and less-and-less-subtle anti-white agenda, Barack Obama presents the GOP with a chance, mostly likely its last one, to establish itself as the opposition to the multicultural disease that is slowly killing America—instead, GOP.com proves, once again, that the Stupid Party isn’t the cure but just another symptom.
There are a lot more White Southerners and Midwesterner than Blacks in this country, and the electoral re-alignment of the parties that’s been developing over the past four decades might have actually delivered the GOP the “permanent majority” Karl Rove dreamed about. In fact, if the White share of the U.S. population and electorate was not rapidly declining due to the GOP’s failure to do anything about immigration, then Barack Obama wouldn’t be president.
With GOP.com one gets the sense that even if Republicans could add, they wouldn’t care.
The GDP numbers out yesterday, which showed economic growth at 3.5% in the third quarter, brought a deafening chorus from public and private economists who all agreed that the recession is officially over. With such a strong report, they are happy to tell us that not only has the Fat Lady finished her aria, but she has left the building and is sipping champagne in the bath. As usual, it falls on me to rain on the parade.
Even the giddiest commentators admit that the upside GDP surprise resulted almost entirely from government interventions. But, by pushing up public and private debt, expanding government, deepening trade deficits, and pushing down savings rates, these interventions have succeeded only in putting our economy back on an unsustainable path of borrowing and spending. Accordingly, they have prevented the rebalancing necessary for long-term health. Could there be a simpler illustration of trading long-term pain for short-term gain?
Rather than asking these pre-K economists to make such a three dimensional leap, it may be easier just to give them a brief history lesson.
During the decade that corresponds to the Great Depression, annual GNP expanded for six years and contracted for four. After nose-diving in the early years of the decade, GNP turned positive in 1934 and then logged three more years of solid growth (the four year average annual growth rate was 8.5%). But does anyone really believe the Great Depression ended in 1934, when the economy first stopped contracting? Unemployment reached 19% in 1938, nearly the peak of the entire Depression, almost a full decade after the stock market crashed! Why will we be so much luckier this time around?
The unpopular truth is that rather than curing the economy, government stimulus has made it sicker. The Bush Administration and the Greenspan Fed pursued this policy recipe in the 2002-2003 recession. The result was four years of phony growth, greater global imbalances, and the development of unsupportable asset bubbles. Clearly we have learned nothing from those mistakes.
Third quarter “growth” was largely driven by a 23% increase in residential construction (the largest quarterly increase since 1986) and a 3.1% increase in consumer spending, which included a 22% jump in durable goods purchases—mostly automobiles—and 2.3% gain in government spending. Since the increase in consumption outpaced the increase in production, the trade deficit expanded, reversing the positive trend for most of 2008 and 2009. Because the increase in spending outpaced the increase in incomes, the savings rate plunged from 4.9% in the prior quarter to 3.3%.
The sizzling numbers for housing and autos resulted from heady cocktail of policy stimulants: near-zero interest rates, government-guaranteed mortgages, Federal Reserve purchases of mortgaged-backed securities, tax credits for homebuyers, bailouts for auto finance companies and “cash for clunkers” for car buyers.
But the last thing our economy needs is for scarce resources to be wasted through uneconomical incentives.
If the government were not “stimulating the economy,” higher interest rates and falling home prices would have hamstrung residential construction. That would have been the right move. Instead, based on the false economic signals of the “stimulus,” we continue to build houses for which no legitimate demand exists.
The same is true for cars. Because of stimulus money, Americans are buying cars that they otherwise would not have. In a free market, the money would have been used for a more constructive purpose. Perhaps it would have been saved, used to pay off existing debt, or spent on a less expensive mode of transport, like a used motorcycle.
The economy ran into a wall in 2008 because consumers bought houses and cars that they really could not afford. That is why the institutions that provided the loans, such as banks, Fannie & Freddie, and GMAC, went bankrupt. It should be obvious that the solution to our economic problems will not be found by redoubling these efforts. This is akin to a drunk having a few more drinks in order to get sober!
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal detailed the myriad ways in which Senators and Congressman are now compelling General Motors to make business decisions that are solely driven by the legislators’ own political considerations, not the best interest of the taxpayers who now own the company. Such a dynamic is now underway in nearly every facet of our economy. An efficient allocation of resources—the only path to economic growth—is only possible when market forces, not Beltway bureaucrats, call the shots.
In the end, this stimulus, just like prior doses, will only worsen the condition it is meant to cure. When it wears off, the resulting recession will be even bigger than the one that everyone assumes has just ended. Until the impulse to fight recessions with government stimulus is quashed, genuine economic growth will never return. A string of ever-worsening recessions will eventually lead to what will be the next Great (Inflationary) Depression. But for now, enjoy the bubbly.
Here’s a truly scary Halloween tale told to me by a long suffering resident of America’s leading hipster landfill; Williamsburg, Brooklyn. For those unacquainted with this Mecca of pretense, let’s just say the folks there don’t wait for Halloween to act like brain-dead zombies.
So yesterday my friend was in a video store, and a little girl waltzed in dressed as an axe murderer. She was covered in fake blood, and was wearing an apron with something hanging from it. The predictably bearded hipster at the counter took a break from mentally undressing Obama to ask what was on her apron. The girl told him it was a severed hand.
The hipster’s apparently earnest reply?
“Ugh, in a vegan neighborhood?”
Is there any way we can get these emotional invalids to just secede already? How about a Civil War that forces them OUT of the Union? I say give them Long Island. They can call their new country Indignation.
Unfortunately, my friend lacked the presence of mind to chop off the hipster’s hand and give it to the young lady. Nothing says Brooklyn like a little authenticity.
A Kabul–based United Nations’s guesthouse is the latest target to be hit by Afghani insurgents. Eight people, including an American, were killed.
Three days prior, capital-city Kabul was the scene of a helicopter crash that claimed 14 American lives, in what the Associated Press characterized as “the deadliest day for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan in more than four years.”
A day later, eight more American troops were taken out in two separate insurgent attacks, this time in southern Afghanistan.
So far, the Left’s Prince of Peace has beefed-up Bush-era troop levels to 68,000, and is giving a good deal of thought to further deepening American involvement in the Afghan theater. The recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (now that provided some comedic relief) has managed to also sustain his predecessor’s efforts in Baghdad, where streets are slick with fresh blood.
As Dr. Johnson said, “There is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.” Neoconservative (Bush) or Progressive (Barack); louse or flea—a pest is still a pest.
It’s hard to tell whether B.O. believes his own the blather. Nevertheless, the president has expressed a talismanic faith that if he solves Afghanistan, he’ll solve terrorism: “This is not a war of choice, this is a war of necessity,” he roared. “Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaida would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”
Bush all over again.
Still earlier in October, 300 Taliban warriors stormed an isolated American-cum-NATO outpost in the same Podunk. They swarmed from out of a village and mosque. Curiously, the Afghani soldiers “fighting” alongside our men suffered few casualties. Americans paid the price.
The Taliban were said to have captured 35 of the policemen Americans are fighting to the death to train. My guess is that the “imprisoned” Pashtun (or perhaps they are Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, or Turkmen) are breaking bread with their Taliban “captors.”
Naturally, Afghans (who’re mostly Muslim) have more of an affinity for the Taliban than for the Wilsonians who’re attempting to westernize them. Thus, it is not uncommon to hear of an Afghan policeman opening fire on his American “colleagues” during a joint operation. Just the other day, as Times Online tells it, one battalion lost two soldiers—three were wounded—“when an Afghan policeman opened fire on his American colleagues during a joint operation to clear the Taliban from villages around the Nerkh valley.”
The studied ignorance of their leaders can’t inspire much confidence in the army. Thus we learn that “US and Afghan investigators are trying to determine whether the policeman was a covert member of the Taliban or made a mistake. Either way”—Times again—“the attack fuelled the distrust that many NATO soldiers feel towards the Afghan security forces they are training as part of the coalition’s eventual exit strategy”:
‘You don’t trust anybody, especially after an incident like this,’ said Specialist Raquime Mercer, 20, whose close friend died in the attack.”
All told, 55 American soldiers died during the month of October.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of the 100,000-strong US and NATO force in Afghanistan, knows as much about America’s decades-long, dismal history of nation-building in Afghanistan as he does about discipline, the military chain of command and code of conduct. In an attempt to fortify his fiefdom, this politician in fatigues sojourned to London to lobby for more soldiers. There, McChrystal demanded that his wishes become Obama’s commands—and quick, before public support wanes.
One brave and bright soldier served it straight up. Wrote Jim Sauer, a “retired Marine Corps Sergeant Major and combat veteran with over thirty years of service,” turned blognoscente:
“The real Afghan warriors still have the spirit of the Mongol Horde in their blood. By contrast, the bulk of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP) are not fighters, nor are they ‘true believers.’ They are simply cowards—frauds—corrupt to the core by any standard and apostates to their own faith. They are slovenly, drug-addicted, dimwitted, and totally unreliable at any level… They thrive on their petty powers and refuse to shoulder any burden or responsibility. Does this sound too harsh? Not for the Marines and Soldiers who have been killed by the treachery of ANA and ANP who have purposely led them into ambush.”
It has been said that Afghanistan is where empires go to die. True enough. But it is men in the flesh who pay so very dearly.
If we had it to do over, would we send an army into Afghanistan to build a nation?
Would we invade Iraq?
While these two wars have cost 5,200 dead, a trillion dollars and a divided America facing an endless war, what have we won?
Gen. Stanley McChrystal needs 40,000 to 80,000 more troops, or we risk “mission failure” in Afghanistan. At present casualty rates—October was the worst month of the war—thousands more Americans will die before we see any light at the end of this tunnel, if ever we do.
Pakistan, which aided us in Afghanistan, now has a war of its own to fight. Its army is in a battle in South Waziristan, while the country is wracked by terror bombings, the latest in a Peshawar bazaar that specialized in women’s clothing and jewelry and toys for kids. So horrific was the toll even the Taliban and al-Qaida denied any role in it.
The 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq are, after almost seven years, to begin pulling out two months after January’s election. But a hitch has developed. Iraq’s parliament missed the deadline for setting the rules. At issue: Will voters be allowed to choose individual candidates, or will they be allowed only to vote for slates of candidates?
Gen. Ray Odierno implies that postponement of the election may mean postponement of U.S. withdrawals.
Ominously, in August, terrorists bombed the foreign and finance ministries in Baghdad, and last week blew up the Justice Ministry and Baghdad Provincial Governorate. And the Kurds are now claiming their control of oil-rich Kirkuk is non-negotiable, which crosses a red line in Baghdad.
Next door, a terror attack by Jundallah (God’s Brigade) in Iran’s southern province of Sistan-Baluchistan killed 40, including two senior commanders of the Revolutionary Guard.
An enraged Tehran pointed the finger at the United States, as there have been charges the CIA has been in contact with Jundallah as part of President Bush’s destabilization program to effect “regime change.”
But Barack Obama has been in office for nine months—and he would never authorize such an attack on the eve of a critical meeting on Iran’s nuclear program. Moreover, the State Department condemned the Jundallah bombing as terrorism and offered public condolences to the families of the victims.
But if we didn’t authorize this, who did?
Was the timing of this attack coincidental? Were these just freelance secessionists on an operation unrelated to the U.S.-Iran talks? Or is someone trying to torpedo the talks and push Iran and the United States into military collision?
For this was a provocation. And whoever carried it out and whoever authorized or abetted it wishes to dynamite the U.S.-Iran negotiations, abort a rapprochement and put us on a road to war.
Speculation is focusing on the Saudis, the Gulf Arabs and the Israelis, who have been accused, as has the United States, of aiding PJAK, a Kurdish faction that has conducted raids in northern Iran.
If we have any control of these organizations, we should shut them down. With U.S. armies tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan, and America conducting Predator and cross-border attacks in Pakistan, provoking a war with Iran would be an act of madness.
Looking back, how has all this fighting advanced U.S. national interests? We have a “democratic” Iraq that is Shia-dominated and tilting to Iran. We have an open-ended war in Afghanistan that will likely do for Obama what Iraq did for Bush. But we can’t pull out, it is said, for if we do, Kabul falls and Afghanistan becomes the sanctuary for an Islamist war to take over Pakistan and its nuclear weapons.
And if that should happen, it would indeed be a crisis.
And so, how has all this intervention availed us?
We ran Saddam out of Kuwait and put U.S. troops into Saudi Arabia. And we got Osama bin Laden’s 9-11. We responded by taking down the Taliban and taking over Afghanistan. And we got an eight-year war with no victory and no end in sight. Now Pakistan is burning. We took down Saddam and got a seven-year war and an ungrateful Iraq.
Meanwhile, the Turks, who shared a border with Saddam, have done no fighting. Iran has watched as we destroyed its two greatest enemies, the Taliban and Saddam. China, which has a border with both Pakistan and Afghanistan, has sat back. India, which has a border with Pakistan and fought three wars with that country, has stayed aloof.
The United States, on the other side of the world, plunged in. And now we face an elongated military presence in Iraq, an escalating war in Afghanistan and potential disaster in Pakistan, and are being pushed from behind into a war with Iran.
“America rejects the false comfort of isolationism,” said George W. Bush in his 2006 State of the Union. And we did reject that false comfort. And now we can enjoy the fruits of interventionism.
I don’t know much about economics. What I do know is that so many so-called “experts,” including politicians and economists, are wrong far more often than they are right. They’re wrong about virtually everything, and yet shamelessly keep selling the same old fairy tales. They are liars. They are cheats. They are whores.
As Congress plots government healthcare, Americans should remember how incredibly wrong Washington leaders were about the cost of programs like Medicare. Bush and Obama have already been proven irrevocably wrong about TARP and stimulus, and yet both claim it’s working. Months ago in South Carolina, Gov. Mark Sanford stood firm in refusing to sign off on extending unemployment benefits, demanding that that department be overhauled so that any future crisis might be averted. This week, a less aggressive, post-scandal Sanford signed off on allowing federal stimulus dollars to keep SC’s unemployed propped up for a few more weeks. Problem not solved, just prolonged. Sanford was right the first time.
And despite his apology, so was Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson when he called Federal Reserve adviser Linda Robertson a “K Street Whore.” During an appearance on the Alex Jones radio show, Grayson said “this lobbyist, this K street whore, is trying to teach me about economics.” Robertson had attacked Grayson for his efforts, along with Republicans like Congressman Ron Paul, Sen. Jim DeMint and others, to audit the Federal Reserve.
Probably most famous for saying Republicans who opposed Obama’s healthcare plan simply want Americans to “die quickly,” Grayson has quickly established himself as an outspoken congressman who pulls no punches.
When I heard conservative critics attacking Grayson this week for daring to call Robertson a “K Street Whore,” I had to laugh. Was the Right simply going after Grayson for his earlier attack on anti-government healthcare Republicans, or were they really upset that he would refer to a representative of the Federal Reserve as a whore? Is it not a primary function of conservatives, especially rightwing talk radio, to lambaste and lampoon the whoring politicians who run Capitol Hill? Hell, conservative humorist PJ O’Rourke’s 1991 take on the entire US government was a book entitled “Parliament of Whores.” If Robertson were a man, would there have been any controversy?
If anyone deserves to be called whores or worse it’s the criminals who run the Federal Reserve, a secretive institution that continues to steal from the American people by printing as much money as it sees fit. Before becoming a top lobbyist for the Fed, Robertson was, appropriately enough, a top lobbyist for Enron. Notes Grayson spokesman Todd Jurkowski, Robertson “attacked the Congressman and his efforts to promote a Republican bill to audit the Federal Reserve… She’s a career lobbyist who used to work for Enron and advocates for whatever she gets paid to promote.” What Robertson has been paid to promote during her lobbying career are institutions primarily in the business of theft, and the Fed adviser has long worked the K Street strip like no other.
Obama’s massive healthcare agenda, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, our vast domestic welfare state, “stimulus” packages - every bit of big government imaginable - could not be afforded if the Federal Reserve did not allow the United States to live far beyond its means. The US borrows from China and prints more money. That’s how we get by. That’s how we get debt. Our leaders on Capitol Hill, from men like Tim Geithner and Bernanke to women like Robertson and Nancy Pelosi are liars, cheats, and yes, whores - and then some.
And more people should say so. One need not agree with Grayson’s opinions on everything to admire his blunt language about one of the US’s most destructive institutions and those who run it. If Republican Congressman Joe Wilson shouting “you lie!” at President Obama was arguably this year’s best summation of our Washington rulers, Democrat Congressman Alan Grayson calling the Federal Reserve’s head lobbyist a “K Street Whore” was a close second. But like Wilson, Grayson’s greatest mistake was in limiting his criticism to just one bureaucrat.
Above, Steve Phillips, former ESPN analyst, is pictured with Brooke Hundley, the ESPN employee with whom he had a brief fling which resulted in her stalking him, going to his home, writing a letter to his wife, and Facebook-friending his son.
Phillips is now reportedly receiving treatment for sex addiction.
I’d always thought that “sex addiction” was mostly just a pseudo-psychological excuse for errant male behavior.
After seeing the picture above, I realized, it really must be a disease.
Disclaimer: I would never mock someone on the basis of their appearance alone. But once they’ve done something like rape a 13 year old girl (like Polanski), or stalk someone and his family, their looks become fair game.
Good news and bad news. First the bad, Tom Woods has been keeping an insane schedule for some time now. It was only a year ago that he gave me a call saying that he was going to be a bit late with a Takimag article because he was writing a book on the financial crisis. This book was, of course, Meltdown
We definitely plan to have Tom come speak to us next year. Stepping up to pinch hit will be Steve Sailer, who’ll lecture us on Jewish liberals and how they got that way. Though we’ll all miss Tom, I’m sure Sailerholics will be happy to learn that they can get a double dose of Sailer this weekend.
The good news is that the response to the Mencken Club has been tremendous. We broke triple digits in attendance last week, and I expect a surge in registration over the next two days.
Many Takimag types—people who “think like us,” so to speak—think that they’re all alone in a world gone mad. They are not alone. And I can’t imagine a better place to meet like-minded individuals and rub shoulders with the likes of John Derbyshire, Sailer, Kevin Gutzman et al. Get your last-minute tickets here.
The recent brouhaha between the White House and Fox News, and subsequent comparisons between Fox and MSNBC, spurred me to quantify an impression I’d had in the past: that primetime Fox News regularly has guests with opposing viewpoints, whereas MSNBC does not.
To that end I watched both Bill O’Reilly on Fox and Keith Olbermann on MSNBC from 8 to 9PM on Monday and Tuesday evenings. (Olbermann wasn’t on Wednesday night.) I flipped back and forth to make sure I didn’t miss any guests.
My impression was confirmed.
On Monday evening, most of O’Reilly’s guests had conservative views, but he did have Juan Williams, a liberal, and also Mary Ann Marsh, a Democratic strategist. Williams generally tones himself down when on Fox, so let’s count Monday night’s tally as one and a half Democrats. On Tuesday, O’Reilly interviewed Joe Sestak and Anthony Weiner, both Democratic Congressmen. He interviewed Alan Colmes, one of Fox’s two token in-house liberals. And he had on legal expert Jennifer Smetters, who argued vigorously with O’Reilly, although she didn’t seem a political animal—though all lawyers are liberal. We’ll call that three and a half Democrats for Tuesday night.
Keith Olbermann had on exactly zero Republicans Monday night. His guests included Chuck Schumer, Ariana Huffington, Chris Hayes (the Washington editor of The Nation), Richard Wolffe, an MSNBC analyst, and author Susie Essman. Tuesday night’s lineup also featured zero Republicans. Olbermann had on Senator Wyden, Rose Ann Demoro (from the National Nurses Organizing Committee), Howard Fineman, an MSNBC analyst, and Gene Robinson, a Washington Post columnist.
This trend tends to continue, by the way, for the next hour. Sean Hannity of Fox has Democrats on (though generally not as many as O’Reilly), whereas Rachel Maddow of MSNBC has no Republicans on her show.
What does it say about a talk show host that he won’t allow any opposing viewpoints? Is he afraid to get into an argument because he knows, or at least senses, that the facts won’t back him up? Is it intellectual laziness? Is he afraid that the brittleness of his personality will be exposed by having to face an actual opponent?
Is it all of the above?
Liberals are always forever congratulating themselves on their open-mindedness. Yet one would think true open-mindedness would require at least hearing the counter argument. But neither Olbermann nor Maddow is willing to do this. (So much for “diversity.”)
This is in keeping with attitude of liberals on campus, who will often shout down conservative speakers in an effort to prevent them from getting their message across. Part of the reason for this, of course, is their fear that an audience might be swayed by their opponents’ arguments. (Conservatives on campus simply don’t do this to liberal speakers.)
In election years, candidates will often try to make it appear that their opponent is the one unwilling to debate. Fox seems to have won this battle.
Watch O’Reilly, and after a while you get the feeling that his crocodile smile exudes smugness. His driving force seems to be egotism. Watch Olbermann, and it quickly becomes apparent that he’s driven by hate, the emotion liberals love to disparage yet themselves indulge in so frequently. With Olbermann, it’s his very lifeblood. You’ll never hear him say much positive about the left; he far prefers to spend his hour insulting Republicans.
There are also undercurrents of hysteria and compulsiveness that pervade Olbermann’s presentation. He doesn’t seem able to help himself: he absolutely must sneer at every Republican he mentions. On Tuesday night alone, Obermann referred to Rick “Mad Dog” Santorum,” “Failed presidential candidate Fred Thompson,” “Lead teabaggist Dick Armey,” “apparent Adirondack expert Newt Gingrich” (who had gotten into an argument with other Republicans over whether to support the Republican or Conservative candidate in a local race), “streetwalker for the insurance industry” (in reference to a Republican who didn’t support the health bill, I didn’t catch the name), and “the torture President” (Bush).
The reference to Armey, for those unfamiliar with it, was Olbermannn’s way of twisting the Republican term “tea parties,” named after the famous Boston one which preceded the Revolutionary War, into “teabagging,” a sexual practice among gay men. One has absolutely nothing to do with the other, making this a completely gratuitous and nonsensical reference on Olbermann’s part. Had a Republican said this, he would of course have been accused of being homophobic.
When O’Reilly and Sean Hannity have Democrats on their show, they are generally polite, if argumentative. One gets the sense that this would be beyond Olbermann’s capacity.
This isn’t even an indictment of all of MSNBC. Chris Matthews, a liberal who hosts an earlier show, exudes earnestness and good will. Pat Buchanan, of all people, is a regular commentator. Unfortunately, MSNBC has reserved prime time for their most extreme voices, both of whom, especially Olbermann, are rigid to the point of brittleness.
A reader informs me that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed:
I just wanted to alert you to the Snopblocks urban legends) explanation of this… the store manager may have been a kind of Muslim-Borat naif in his celebration of a particular Islamic moveable-feast, but he apparently wasn’t trying to celebrate 9/11 as such:
* Imam Ali was not a hijacker, but a 7th century religious figure… attacked by an assassin while praying in a mosque… and died two days later, so the 21st day of Ramadan is (among the Shi’a branch) a day of special significance, a day for honoring the martyrdom of the Imam Ali.”;
* The months of the Islamic [lunar] calendar move around from year to year with respect to the Gregorian calendar. In 2009… the 21st day of Ramadan… coincidentally fell on the date of September 11;
* Store manager Imran Chunawala was stunned [by the reaction] because the holiday had nothing to do with 9/11… ‘If people thought that that’s what this was about, I apologize,” Chunawala said. “That was not what this was about. I’m clarifying once again and I seriously am sorry for any misunderstanding that this caused.”
NEW YORK—Something’s bothering me about the Polanski business. No, unlike Harvey Weinstein and Bernard-Henri Lévy—not to mention that Mitterrand paedophile—I will not defend Roman’s actions with a 13-year-old, but I will say that, with friends like his making fools of themselves defending him, it will be a miracle if he gets off with a slap on the wrist. Although this may sound pompous, I doubt if any of his defenders have known Polanski as long as I have—40 years and counting—but let’s take it from the top.
What Hugo Rifkind wrote about him and his defenders in these pages on 3 October is spot-on. Hollywood has a lot to answer for, and mixing up global warming, Darfur, HIV and Roman’s case is not exactly kosher. I particularly liked what he said about Mel Gibson, who was nearly hounded out of Tinseltown for a drunken anti-Semitic outburst, one for which he has apologized more times than I’ve had hangovers. “But Polanski shags an actual child and they love him.” Ironically, the four people who failed to sign the petition for Roman were Woody Allen, Robert Blake, O.J. Simpson and Phil Spector, the last two being in the pokey as I write.
Yes, there are a lot of jokes about Polanski making the rounds, but in the meantime he is having a very bad time in a Swiss jail. Psychologically, that is. Let’s face it, it does smell a bit of Inspector Javert, 32 years on. I first met Roman when he walked into my bedroom in Gstaad uninvited and insisted on watching me punch and kick a tiny piece of paper hanging from a string. (It was to speed up one’s kicks and punches for an upcoming karate tournament.) We began hanging out together after that, and he even flew Bruce Lee over and I trained with him. Yes, we did have a falling-out after the events in Los Angeles, and I did write some mean things about him, but we have made up and only he knows the price he has paid for that one moment—or hour—of madness. Roman now has children, is happily married, and, as his good friend the wonderful Ronnie Harwood has said to me, no child, especially one as talented and as delightful as his boy Elvis, deserves this.
I will not try the line that phonies like Bernard-Henri Lévy have used, that artists are above the law and that then 13 was the new 18. Or that grotesque Whoopi Goldberg’s that it wasn’t ‘rape-rape’. The one I will try is this: what in Heaven’s name has happened to compassion? Polanski has been on the run for 32 years, has never come close to repeating his crime, and has rehabilitated himself in spades. What kind of society are we that in order to further the political career of an obscure California district attorney we use the full power of two states to punish a man who was born punished. First by the Nazis and then by the Manson gang. No wonder poor Roman feels hard done by.
And speaking of forgiveness, I don’t remember Menachem Begin, a ferocious terrorist, ever apologising for murdering 91 people when he blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, 28 of whom were British. He didn’t even apologise for that while receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet the world forgave and forgot once Israel became a big-time player thanks to Uncle Sam. The cold-blooded murderer Magee is received by those whose parents and families he killed, and he certainly hasn’t apologised. The only one who got it right on this was, of course, the magnificent Norman Tebbit, whose wife, the brave Margaret, is living proof that those Irish animals should rot in jail instead of hanging out with polite society. I don’t remember the egregious Ted Kennedy asking for Sirhan Sirhan to be set free after 41 years in a very tough jail.So where’s Catholic and Irish compassion where the Palestinian is concerned?
The world is just one big double standard. So before anyone accuses me of defending child molestation, what about Jeffrey Epstein, a man who was tried and convicted of paying underage women to give him sexual rubdowns, but who served less than 13 months of a ridiculously soft sentence of 18 months? Epstein had the following going for him. He is a billionaire, despite the fact that no one knows how he made his pile, as he trained and worked as a maths researcher. Epstein also had letters recommending his character to the judge in Palm Beach from Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Bill Clinton, whom Epstein flew all over the world in his private plane and who is a close friend of his.
So, a crime committed 32 years ago and paid for in full as far as I’m concerned by a man who has known more suffering than most of us is to be pursued to the bitter end, whereas Jeffrey Epstein, friend of the powerful and a billionaire, does only 12 months in a country-club jail in Palm Beach. If that’s true justice, then the law is an ass — but I always knew that. Why don’t we try compassion and forgiveness for a change, but not for truly bad guys, just for poor Roman Polanski.
A friend of Paul Gottfried sent Takimag this report from his last trip to the mall in Houston, Texas:
Today I went to the Harwin Central Mall to pick up some crystals. The very first store that you come to when you walk from the lobby of the building into the shopping area had this sign posted on their door. The shop is run by Muslims. I couldn’t stay in the building, it made me so sick.
The text reads, “We will be closed on Friday, September 11, 2009, to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Ali (A.S.).” The message is repeated in Spanish.
In the latest issue of Quadrant, Peter Kocan complains about my “sourness” in depicting the paleoconservative persuasion in my autobiography, Encounters
This quotation from my Southern friend of many years has nothing to do with what Peter scolds me for not interpreting more charitably. Given its institutions and cultural-ethnic identity going back centuries, the American South has been far more of an historical reality than paleoconservatism, a fading movement of which I’m believed to be the most venerable living theorist.
Unlike Southerners, Frenchmen, English, Italians, Jews, etc., paleoconservatives do not constitute a long-standing community. They were a reaction to the rise of the neoconservatives as the dominant force in the American conservative movement. Spirited rebels who fought on against a more powerful enemy determined to crush them, the paleoconservatives reached the zenith of their influence in the late 1980s and early 1990s; thereafter they descended rapidly into becoming no more than an historical footnote. It is now hard to find even references to paleoconservatism in accounts of the postwar conservative movement. Recent historians of the movement have ceased to view paleos as even an interesting sideshow.
In his recently published anthology Reappraising the Right
But this effort at sober assessment does not mean that I’ve thrown up my hands and left the battlefield to our enemies. What I’m suggesting is that whoever (God willing!) brings down the neoconservatives and their mercenary empire, it will not be my generation. The Soviet tyranny eventually fell, but the ones who accomplished this were not the Russian Whites who fought the Reds after the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviet empire came down because of a generation of adversaries who were not around in 1919 and 1920. While I’m not declaring that the battle against our enemies is irreversibly lost, I’m definitely saying that paleoconservatives will not win the battle they began. It will be left to a younger generation to carry on that struggle.
I’m also not sure that the side to which Professor Wilson appeals has a brighter future than do the paleoconservatives. The black population of the South, to put it mildly, is hardly on Professor Wilson’s side; and those white people who voted for the outspokenly anti-Confederate McCain, whose revulsion for the white South except as a reliable voting base, could not have been more clear, are not about to rally to the Cause. I’ve no idea (speaking as a passionate admirer of Stonewall Jackson) how the onetime reverence for the South as a culture of gallantry and aristocratic virtues can ever be revived, after the multicultural Left and the neoconservatives have combined to slander anything resembling a white Southern heritage. It’s also not the case that the transformation of the Old South in the public imagination from the opening scenes of Gone With The Wind to something even more hideous than Ausschwitz took place over a long period of time. This government- and media-sponsored metamorphosis took place entirely within my adult lifetime.
Still it is much easier for me to feel sympathy for Professor Wilson’s neo-Confederates than it is to weep over the fate of paleoconservatism. The neo-Confederates are a pleasanter lot than most paleos of my acquaintance, and they can point to an intergenerational pedigree. But they also face insurmountable problems. After the damage that its embattled opponents and demographic trends have inflicted on the Southern heritage, it is doubtful this tradition can make a comeback, except as a theme park. But the war against the neoconservatives is in fact winnable. It will only take lots of time and the acquisition of resources; and more than one generation will be needed to make significant dents in the enemy’s fortifications.
Allow me to make one final point about Peter Kocan’s fond references to the Jacobites and to other lost reactionary causes. This doting is fine as an aesthetic diversion, but can do nothing to change the cultural Marxist power structure that has taken over through most of the Western world. The relevant response to this situation is “political
When I emigrated from newly post-Soviet Russia, I stayed in touch with some of my classmates. Years later, I began hearing about our mutual acquaintances, girls in their late teens and early twenties at that time, getting abortions in the half-a-dozen range. The very existence of these rumors was shocking.
The epidemic of terminating pregnancies as a form of birth control remains one of the biggest challenges to Russia’s demographic struggle. Arkady Mamontov’s new prolife film, simply called Abortion, is the latest attempt to raise awareness about this issue. Whether the film is independent is largely irrelevant, as it premiered on state channel Rossiya during last Sunday’s popular television talk show, Special Correspondent. The host, Maria Sittel, also seemed quite supportive of this filmmaker during the follow-up expert discussion panel.
This graphic documentary examines Russia’s private clinics, which illegally end unwanted pregnancies long after the first-trimester limit, including on-camera admissions to destroying just about fully formed babies at 22, or so, weeks. A particularly disturbing moment involves a medical staff lecturing an undercover correspondent, pretending to be 15-weeks pregnant, regarding the ethics of her decision “to murder her baby” all the while agreeing to perform the procedure.
Mamontov is no stranger to controversy, and this documentary fits the mould: not because of its shock value per se, but, rather, the filmmaker’s bold assertion regarding one major cause of this epidemic. He points his finger at the Western political establishment. Not only has the United States’ and, to a lesser extent, the European Union’s foreign policy been aimed at encircling Russia in the past twenty years, he argues, but the West has been attempting to depopulate this country from the inside.
His main culprit is organizations like Planned Parenthood. Instead of “leading a ‘brave and angry’ stance with regard to people’s right to access to good sexual and reproductive health care and services”, as the IPPF website claims, this institution has been responsible for dispensing irresponsible and potentially deadly advice to unsuspecting Russian women, whom the filmmaker interviews.
Why is his country a target? Mamontov tells his viewers to read Brzezinski: it is unfair for Russia alone to access all the rich natural resources within its immense territory. This geopolitical reasoning allows the documentary to avoid a preachy pro-life tone so typical of this genre.
However, Arkady Viktorovich never had the onus of proof that these insatiable Eurasian desires exist. Rather than emphasizing Russia’s uniqueness, he should have elaborated on the civilizational discontents, as Freud would say, that drive these institutions well beyond their intended raison d’être—and not only in Russia.
But, at least shock value gets the ratings!
Regarding Nina Kouprianova’s “Motherland” piece, it has long seemed to me that most thriving civilizations have been undergirded by two tenets:
1) A recognition of something greater than itself (i.e., a God or gods)
2) A recognition of something lower than itself (the animal kingdom and natural habitat).
Most Western nations have largely forsaken both premises. They have become much more secular (adios “something greater”) and now fret more about the environment and its suitability for the local frog population than they do about having progeny of their own. Some even recommend foregoing children to ensure greater frog comfort (effectively demoting themselves to the “something lower”).
What’s more, many Westerners see the spread of religious skepticism and the growth of environmentalism as signs of progress. What they do not seem to compute is that for all of their advances, what they are ultimately doing is progressing themselves out of existence. Naively, they appear confident that they’ve won the debate about whether one should still believe in the Divine and in man’s place atop the food chain.
Well, it all depends on how you define winning. Looking at the numbers, I wouldn’t even call these Pyrrhic victories. All that folks on Team Progress have to show for their triumph is their replacement by those sticking to the something greater/something lower model. The debates’ “winners” are simply being exchanged for people who didn’t hear the ref blow the whistle.
My instincts are to laugh at government sloganeering. Still, at the very least it is refreshing to see a campaign that equates patriotism with living for your country rather than dying for it.
I’ll grant Tom that Richard Dawkins (who’s made time between writing hysterical liberal op-eds to compose a 500-page tome
Just this afternoon (providence perhaps?), I received an email about a fascinating anti-Darwin conference that shall take place in Rome in November:
Scientific Conference Refuting Evolution Theory to be held in Rome, Italy
In Response to Pope Benedict XVI’s Call for Both Sides to be Heard
ROME, ITALY – The 150th anniversary of Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” in November 2009 will be the occasion for a unique conference at Pope Pius V University in Rome presenting a scientific refutation of evolution theory.
The conference, “The Impossibility of Evolution” will be held on November 9 in the auditorium of St. Pius V University (Via Cristoforo Colombo, No. 200) beginning at 9:30 a.m.
I have nothing against the holding of this conference; indeed, many of the participants are impressively credentialed. But the existence of such an event makes me think that it’d be more intellectually consistent for Catholic trads to view eternal damnation-bound Dawkins as a mortal foe, and not expect him to address the pope with proper salutations and refrain from saying ugly things about the church.
In many ways, this discussion reminds me of some of the nostalgic reveries penned by prominent Catholic paleos about the Habsburgs and their empire, usually with Kaisers Franz Josef and Karl I depicted as saintly Christian rulers. There is, of course a great deal of truth to such portrayals, the later having made well-intentioned efforts to end the blood-letting of the Great War. But the House of Habsburg only became benign, warm, and fuzzy in its late, decadent period when the Old World was collapsing all around it. Three hundred years early, Habsburg rulers showed little compunction in ordering the slaughter of their Saxon Protestant enemies (my ancestors, by the way). I’m sure Genghis Khan, too, was a dear old chap on his death bed.
I don’t write any of this because I hold some excessively longstanding historical grudge—I don’t. To the contrary, I’ve always had a deep admiration for the glorious contributions to the arts the church patronized during the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation. I guess I just respect and admire the church more when it’s in a bold, aggressive, “pagan” mood, and less when its leaders demand universal tolerance and cry victimization.
More news on the David Letterman and playing bouncy bouncy with the staff story. Nell Scovell, who worked as a writer for the show in the 90s, talks about the atmosphere that led her to quit in Vanity Fair.
Scovell’s point is not that she was sexually harassed directly, far from it. Letterman paid her a little attention (as men are wont to do with young women) but certainly nothing objectionable. Similarly, no other manager forced themselves upon her nor made lewd suggestions. However, she does say that she felt she had to quit because of the atmosphere of sexual harassment. The problem, as she saw it, was that managers were indeed conducting affairs with the younger female staff. Nothing particularly objectionable about that: wives might object but that’s a personal matter, not one for public policy. Similarly, as long as the affairs are between consulting adults not really anyone else’s business as long as no one tells the pastor.
No, her point is that those young women who were having affairs were privileged in the workplace. They got more leeway, more power, over those who were not doing the horizontal rhumba with the bosses. And that in itself is, in the modern formulation, sexual harassment.
Now I’m not all that in love with many elements of the modern world myself and I’m sure most here agree. But some rules about what is and is not allowable really rather do need to be worked out. It’s entirely clear and obvious that men and women working together is going to lead to at least some of them deciding to play Doctors and Nurses whether on a temporary or permanent basis, exclusively or in a rather more secret manner. It woiuld seem absurd to insist that no one can ever date a co-worker. But that is indeed the implication of this description of what constitutes sexual harassment.
In one way, the complaint is that if someone does attempt to sleep with me at work then that is harassment: and if they don’t attempt to do so this is also harassment.
Perhaps the way out is simply to ask that everyone behaves as an adult?
In response to Richard, I did not mean to suggest that England’s Anglican past makes the English particularly susceptible to atheism. I meant to suggest that such English atheists as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Philip Pullman exhibit more hostility to Catholicism than they do to other faiths in part because of their English background. This greater hostility is palpable, and is clearly shown by Dawkins’ latest outburst, which both condemns “Pope Ratzinger” and claims that the “Archbishop of Canterbury” exhibits a “saintly quality,” “a benignity of countenance,” and a “well-meaing sincerity.”
I also think that the rise of men like Dawkins is in part responsible for the decline of Britain, and I make that argument at length in the October 2009 issue of Chronicles. The reason I make that argument is not Anglophobia, but because “We Americans, who owe so much to Britain and are more like the British than any other people in Europe, ignore at our peril the problems Britain is encountering from effectively abandoning Christianity and the rest of her heritage.”
Yes, Dawkins is not a buffoon as a scientist, but he seems to be doing little science these days, preferring instead to sound like Lord George Gordon on the eve of London’s No Popery Riot. An analogue is Linus Pauling, a brilliant scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but who was also a moral and political cretin and a pro-Soviet agitator. National Review properly treated Pauling with disdain, because of his moral and political idiocy. As for me, I intend to give Dawkins the same level of respect he accords Pope Benedict XVI.
The cable period drama Mad Men attempts to answer the question: What would have Cary Grant’s stylish advertising executive in Hitchcock’s 1959 barnburner North by Northwest gotten up to if—instead of getting chased by spies all the way to Abraham Lincoln’s nose on Mt. Rushmore—he and his superb suits had simply stayed on Madison Avenue during the advertising industry’s storied golden age?
After the Tom Cruise generation of boyish, small, and energetic stars, it’s refreshing to see a Golden Age of Hollywoodish leading man like tall, dark, and handsome Jon Hamm, who plays creative director Don Draper as the strong, silent type. Granted, the concept of a reticent copywriter doesn’t make much sense, but the show has become a huge hit with media folks, more than a few of whom are married to people in the ad business.
Mad Men is the latest of this decade’s extended plotline dramas to rivet the attention of the higher end of the TV-viewing audience.
We constantly hear that long-form TV dramas are better than ever. That’s probably true, but few of today’s fans can remember how quickly we all tend to forget past serial dramas that once seemed indelibly memorable.
In contrast to serial shows like Mad Men, Lost, and 24, most television sit-coms and some dramas “reset” at the end of each episode: no matter what zany antics transpired during tonight’s episode, Homer Simpson will be right back at the nuclear power plant next week, unchanged except for the vaguest of memories.
An increasing number of prime-time dramas, however, tease audience interest by ramifying a single complicated plot over the life of the show. By not reaching a conclusion, they leave audiences asking each week, “And then what happens?” This gives fans plenty to chew over with each other until the next episode. (Here, for example, is Slate’s 59-part [!] discussion of the current third season of Mad Men.)
Fans like to call serials “novelistic” (although the unkind term “soap operaish” can also be apt).
Novelists have given up publishing their works in installments, even though that was hugely profitable for numerous 19th Century novelists, such as Charles Dickens. His books were typically serialized in 20 monthly installments of 32 pages of text and 16 pages of advertising. The protracted death of Little Nell in Dickens’ serialization of The Old Curiosity Shop
Tom Wolfe, who had long denounced 20th-century literary fiction for not showing us The Way We Live Now
Unfortunately, Bonfire didn’t make much of a splash in Rolling Stone … because it wasn’t very good. It was a first draft, and Wolfe’s first drafts turned out not to be as good as Dickens’s had been. Moreover, there are obvious problems inherent in going public with the beginning before you’ve written the ending. (This has been a particular conundrum for American TV serial dramas because the writers don’t even know how many years the show will run. Thus, they tend to start strong and peter out. In Britain, however, fixed durations serials are more common.)
Wolfe then rewrote Bonfire after doing the additional research necessary to change his protagonist’s career from Wolfe’s lazy initial choice—writer—to a much more timely and under-publicized one—bond-trader. Revised, Bonfire became a huge bestseller. A long string of subsequent real-life incidents all the way up through the Duke lacrosse rape hoax that seem like plot twists out of Wolfe’s tale of the hunt for “the Great White Defendant” has cemented its status as the Great American Novel of the 1980s.
Movies remain a troublesome format for Dickensian storytellers. Adapting big novels to fit within the limited length of a film remains difficult. Even at 238 minutes, Gone With The Wind’s screenplay had to be a miracle of concision. The 125-minute Brian De Palma version of Bonfire of the Vanities was a notorious flop.
With 1967’s Forsyte Saga (a 26-episode adaptation of five books by Nobel laureate John Galsworthy) and 1971’s Upstairs, Downstairs, the Brits pioneered high-class soap operas that galvanized audiences by artfully following an ensemble of characters through intersecting nested plots in a carefully detailed time and place.
The American equivalent came along in 1987, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herkovitz’s thirtysomething, which artfully portrayed an ensemble of old college friends centered around a yuppie advertising man, Michael Steadman, an undersexed Don Draper for the feminist era.
In its time, thirtysomething was probably the best written and certainly the most realistic show on television (my twentysomething new bride and I watched it wide-eyed as we learned what was in store for us). For a few years, it had a limited but lucrative yupscale demographic enthralled over whether Michael and Hope would be able to make their marriage work and other questions that seemed a lot more interesting at the time than they do now. (At this point, I can mostly just remember Miles Drentell, the ruthless Sun Tzu-quoting CEO of the trendy ad agency where Michael worked.)
The downside of “And then what happens?” is that the answer usually turns out to be “A whole bunch of stuff.” While satisfying at the time, serials tend to be consumable only once. For example, although thirtysomething was immediately influential within the entertainment industry, it was almost forgotten by the public once its run was over in 1991. (It wasn’t even released on DVD
On the other hand, Seinfeld (something of a comic version of thirtysomething, but also a classic reset show in which not even, say, the sudden death of a fiancé has any discernible emotional impact on a character) remains a money machine in syndication.
Another chronic problem with shows that don’t reset is creeping soap operaization. Female fascination with relationships tends to crowd out every other subject over time. Even House, with the wonderful Hugh Laurie as a Sherlock Holmes-like genius/misanthrope solving one medical mystery per week, has become more of a soap opera over the years.
Similarly, Mad Men underexploits its setting in the advertising industry, always a fun business to portray, in favor of emphasizing relationships. In the pilot episode set in 1960, for instance, Don Draper is proclaimed a genius by his clients and colleagues for dreaming up a new slogan for Lucky Strike cigarettes: “It’s Toasted.” In reality, a lame phrase like that would have been laughed at in 1960. Lucky Strike’s “It’s Toasted” slogan actually dates to 1917.
Of course, the advertising business isn’t really what Mad Men is about.
So, what do I think the show is about?
Well, in the spirit of today’s serials, you’ll just have to wait until next Wednesday to find out.
I will mention one thing: the show relentlessly exposes the sexism of pre-feminism men like Don Draper, seemingly for today’s women to cluck over. Instead, they gasp and squeal. Why?
Because women find sexism sexy.
Evidence that the U.S. is a failed state is piling up faster than I can record it.
One conclusive hallmark of a failed state is that the crooks are inside the government, using government to protect and advance their private interests.
Another conclusive hallmark is rising income inequality, as the insiders manipulate economic policy for their enrichment at the expense of everyone else.
Income inequality in the U.S. is now the most extreme of all countries. The 2008 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report, “Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries,” concludes that the U.S. is the country with the highest inequality and poverty rate across the OECD and that, since 2000, nowhere has there been such a stark rise in income inequality as in the U.S.
The OECD finds that in the U.S. the distribution of wealth is even more unequal than the distribution of income.
On Oct. 21, 2009, BusinessWeek reported that a new report from the United Nations Development Program concluded that the U.S. ranked third among states with the worst income inequality. As number one and number two, Hong Kong and Singapore, are both essentially city-states, not countries, the U.S. actually has the shame of being the country with the most inequality in the distribution of income.
The stark increase in U.S. income inequality in the 21st century coincides with the offshoring of U.S. jobs, which enriched executives with “performance bonuses” while impoverishing the middle class, and with the rapid rise of unregulated over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives, which enriched Wall Street and the financial sector at the expense of everyone else.
Millions of Americans have lost their homes and half of their retirement savings while being loaded up with government debt to bail out the banksters who created the derivative crisis.
“Frontline’s” Oct. 21 broadcast, “The Warning,” documents how Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt blocked Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), from performing her statutory duties and regulating OTC derivatives.
After the worst crisis in U.S. financial history struck, just as Brooksley Born said it would, a disgraced Greenspan was summoned out of retirement to explain to Congress his unequivocal assurances that no regulation of derivatives was necessary. Greenspan had even told Congress that regulation of derivatives would be harmful. A pathetic Greenspan had to admit that the free market ideology on which he had relied turned out to have a flaw.
Greenspan may have bet our country on his free market ideology, but does anyone believe that Rubin and Summers were doing anything other than protecting the enormous fraud-based profits that derivatives were bringing Wall Street? As Born stressed, OTC derivatives are a “dark market.” There is no transparency. Regulators have no information on them and neither do purchasers.
Even after Long Term Capital Management blew up in 1998 and had to be bailed out, Greenspan, Rubin and Summers stuck to their guns. Greenspan, Rubin and Summers, and a roped-in gullible Arthur Levitt who now regrets that he was the banksters’ dupe, succeeded in manipulating a totally ignorant Congress into blocking the CFTC from doing its mandated job.
Born, prevented by the public’s elected representatives from protecting the public, resigned. Wall Street money simply shoved facts and honest regulators aside, guaranteeing government inaction and the financial crisis that hit in 2008 and continues to plague our economy today.
The financial insiders running the Treasury, White House and Federal Reserve shifted to taxpayers the cost of the catastrophe that they had created. When the crisis hit, Henry Paulson, appointed by President Bush as Rubin’s replacement as the Goldman Sachs representative running the U.S. Treasury, hyped fear to obtain from “our” representatives in Congress with no questions asked hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars (TARP money) to bail out Goldman Sachs and the other malefactors of unregulated derivatives.
When Goldman Sachs recently announced that it was paying massive six and seven figure bonuses to every employee, public outrage erupted. In defense of banksters, saved with the public’s money, paying themselves bonuses in excess of most people’s lifetime earnings, Lord Griffiths, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International, said that the public must learn to “tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all.”
In other words, “Let them eat cake.”
According to the U.N. report cited above, Great Britain has the seventh-most unequal income distribution in the world. After the Goldman Sachs bonuses, the British will move up in distinction, perhaps rivaling Israel for the fourth spot in the hierarchy.
Despite the total insanity of unregulated derivatives, the high level of public anger and Greenspan’s confession to Congress, still nothing has been done to regulate derivatives. One of Rubin’s assistant treasury secretaries, Gary Gensler, has replaced Born as head of the CFTC. Larry Summers is the head of President Obama’s National Economic Council. Former Federal Reserve official Timothy Geithner, a Paulson protege, runs the Obama Treasury. A Goldman Sachs vice president, Adam Storch, has been appointed the chief operating officer of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Banksters are still in charge.
Is there another country in which in full public view so few so blatantly use government for the enrichment of private interests, with a coterie of “free market” economists available to justify plunder on the grounds that “the market knows best”? A narco-state is bad enough. The U.S. surpasses this horror with its financo-state.
As Brooksley Born says, if nothing is done, “it’ll happen again.”
But nothing can be done. The crooks have the government.
Note: The OECD report shows that despite the Ronald Reagan tax rate reduction, the rate of increase in U.S. income inequality declined during the Reagan years. During the mid-1990s, the Gini coefficient (the measure of income inequality) actually fell. Beginning in 2000 with the New Economy (essentially financial fraud and offshoring of U.S. jobs), the Gini coefficient shot up sharply.
Tom: unfortunately, I don’t have time at the moment to go into this. (I’m preparing for the HL Mencken Club, and one minor personal emergency has followed another.) But I would just like to say that I don’t think the Anglican Church could have endured as long as she has if an irrational (groundless, do you think?) antipathy towards the Catholic Church were her foundation. It is true, of course, that Protestant identity has been intertwined with the development of modern national identity (and England is not alone in this regard.) But to suggest that a country’s independence from Rome makes its intellectuals more prone to atheism is a bit of a stretch. Moreover, Dawkins’s recent blog is embarrassing and conventionally leftist, to be sure, though the man is no buffoon as a scientist, nor I do think his work is a part of soccer hooliganism. I myself picked up the England-bashing paddle the other day, but in my mind, if Britain is worse than the rest of Europe, it’s only by a matter of degrees. And I’m not holding out hope that the West will be saved by Italy or Spain, or the Catholic Church, to be frank. Who knows what motivates the political Left? I am sure, however, that the contemporary Right is not well served by dwelling on ancient hatreds.
In a letter to one of his sons, J.R. R. Tolkien, a convert to Catholicism, wrote, “hatred of Our Church is after all the only real foundation of the C[hurch] of E[ngland]—so deep laid that it remains when all the superstructure seems removed.” So deep laid is the hatred detected by Tolkien that it remains even after all shreds of Anglican belief have vanished, as shown by the atheist Richard Dawkins’ anti-Catholic tirade occasioned by the recent effort by the Roman Catholic Church to create a structure within Catholicism for Anglicans disaffected by their church’s increasing liberalism. Dawkins also reveals himself to be a very pedestrian leftist in his thinking, railing against the Catholic Church and the disaffected Anglicans for their “misogyny” and “homophobic bigotry.” It tells you all you need to know about contemporary Britain, the land of soccer hooliganism and public drunkenness, of Sir Mick Jagger and Sir Elton John, that Dawkins is considered its leading thinker.
UPDATE: I have heard from an Anglican reader, who objected to my use of the Tolkien quote in the context of Dawkins who, after all, is no longer an Anglican. Upon reflection, I think it is a fair point. I would also note my own high regard for many Anglicans, including C S Lewis and John Mason Neale, who translated into English several of my favorite hymns. Indeed, the structure for disaffected Anglicans that Dawkins is objecting to recognizes the value in the Anglican tradition, since it envisions a liturgy based on Anglican tradition. Still, I find it striking that so many of the new atheists are both English and palpably more hostile to Catholicism than to other religions. Something atavistic is at work there, and Dawkins’ anti-Catholic tirade which both damns Pope Benedict XVI (“Pope Ratzinger” to Dawkins) and praises the Archbishop of Canterbury is a prime example of it.
When openly gay college student Matthew Shepard was targeted, tortured and murdered in 1998 the story made national headlines. Soon after, MTV sent a camera crew down to Charleston, South Carolina searching for a redneck or two who might offer some insensitive remarks about homosexuals for their “True Life” series. They found one. Me.
I was a student at the College of Charleston and as the lone conservative writer at the school paper, was asked to participate in the television tapings. I remember telling MTV I believed Shepard’s murderers should receive the death penalty. I also told them, when prodded, that I believed homosexuality was “against God.”
It’s a comment I’ve regretted ever since.
My first regret stems from the blasphemous assumption that I could know the mind of God and secondly, that I had portrayed gay men and women as somehow lesser children of that God. Despite my youthful ignorance, there is nothing more obvious to me today than the fact that the overwhelming majority of homosexuals are born gay. It is nature, not nurture and certainly no choice.
But in a free society what people choose to think about homosexuality should be their choice. The Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act currently being pushed through Congress, which seeks to expand the definition of federal hate crime laws to cover homosexuals, is the criminalization of thought, pure and simple. It’s bad enough that we already have federal laws that cover crimes motivated by racial, ethnic or religious prejudice, which are an affront to free speech that should be abolished. Battery, assault and murder are horrible enough crimes on their own without attaching some special significance to what the perpetrator might think about his victim. Rightly notes South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, there are “fundamental problems with any federal hate crimes legislation. The Rule of Law requires opposition to this idea that we treat crimes differently.”
Not that I don’t understand the rage of homosexuals or racial and religious minorities who sometimes feel like targets of violence. In 2002, my best friend was assaulted for verbally defending the honor of a woman. For his chivalrous deed, my friend, who was far too drunk to defend himself (everyone was intoxicated) had his head mercilessly pounded into the sharp corner of a steel toolbox, coming dangerously close to severely and permanently damaging his eye. The perpetrator was a perennial loser, mad at women, himself and god-knows-what-else, filled with enough “hate” to take on the whole world. At the time, if someone had put a bullet in his head I wouldn’t have lost much sleep over it.
One can only imagine the rage of Mathew Shepard’s family, his friends and particularly those in the gay community who knew him. A loved one was taken by two emotionally-dysfunctional men whose insecurities and personal shortcomings drove them to murder. No doubt, many would like to see Shepard’s killers put to death and it’s an injustice this never happened.
But not because Shepard was gay - because he was an innocent human being who had done nothing to deserve his fate. While murder is certainly worse than assault, is beating up a homosexual a worse crime than beating up my friend? If my friend were homosexual, should his assault take on an entirely new dimension? When violent crimes occur, each born of evil-intentions and producing gruesome results, are some crimes less equal than others? For hate crime law advocates, their answer is an unqualified “yes!” Their logic is repulsive.
Advocates of hate crime laws argue that homosexual and minority members’ particular identities make them especially vulnerable, requiring special legal protection. One could just as easily argue that the colossal disparity between black-on-white violent crime versus white-on-black violent crime makes white Americans especially vulnerable, and yet no one advocates for special legal protection for whites. Some might argue that existing hate crime laws allow for this, but the instances of anti-white hate crimes being prosecuted compared to anti-minority hate crimes, is beyond laughable and no one seems to be clamoring for it.
Most violent crime is born of some sort of hatred and examining motive is certainly crucial in any criminal investigation. But “hate” - for gays, minorities, women, chivalrous men - is still just a thought, and should not be itself, a criminal action. Criminalizing the thought behind a violent act sets dangerous precedent and gives special justice to special groups and lesser justice to victims of similar crimes who do not belong to those groups.
Stupid as it was, what I thought about homosexuality in 1998 should not have been a crime. A few weeks after the MTV special aired, I was standing in a King Street bar when a rather tough lesbian woman violently pushed me from behind, angry over my comments. Looking back, I’m surprised she didn’t punch my lights out. That would have unquestionably been a crime. But not her opinion of me.
“I Hate Liberals” tote bag available Zazzle.com
“Sometimes party loyalty asks too much,” said JFK.
For Sarah Palin, party loyalty in New York’s 23rd congressional district asks too much. Going rogue, Palin endorsed Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman over Republican Dede Scozzafava.
On Oct. 1, Scozzafava was leading. Today, she trails Democrat Bill Owens and is only a few points ahead of Hoffman, as Empire State conservatives defect to vote their principles, not their party.
Newt Gingrich stayed on the reservation, endorsing Scozzafava, who is pro-choice and pro-gay rights, and hauls water for the unions.
Scourged by the right, Newt accused conservatives of going over the hill in the battle to save the republic, just to get a buzz on. “If we are in the business about feeling good about ourselves while our country gets crushed, then I probably made the wrong decision.” How Scozzafava would prevent America’s being “crushed” was unexplained.
The 23rd recalls a famous Senate race 40 years ago. Rep. Charles Goodell was picked by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to fill the seat of Robert Kennedy in 1968. To hold onto it, Goodell swerved sharp left, emerging as an upstate Xerox copy of Jacob Javits, the most liberal Republican in the Senate.
In 1970, Goodell got both the GOP and Liberal Party nominations, and faced liberal Democrat Richard Ottinger. This left a huge vacuum into which Conservative Party candidate James Buckley, brother of William F., smartly moved.
Assessing the field, the Nixon White House concluded that, with liberals split, Goodell could not win. But Buckley might. Signals were flashed north that loyalty to the president was not inconsistent with voting for Buckley. To send the signal in the clear, Vice President Agnew described Charlie Goodell to a New Orleans newspaper as “the Christine Jorgensen of the Republican Party.”
The former George Jorgensen, Christine had undergone the most radical sex-change operation in recorded history.
Liberals went berserk, calling on New Yorkers to rally to Goodell, who began surging, at Ottinger’s expense. Buckley scooted between them both to win. Hoffman may also. But even if he does not, Palin, a conservative of the heart, did the right thing.
And the GOP has been sent a necessary message.
For, according to Gallup, 40 percent of Americans now identify as conservatives—only 20 percent as Republicans. If the GOP is not the conservative party, it will never be America’s Party.
But what does “conservative” mean in 2009? And where do conservatives come down on the great issues? For what the right is against—any repeal of the Bush tax cuts, the $787 billion stimulus, Obamacare—is much clearer than what the right stands for.
In 2010, this may not matter, as the Obamakins rule the roost and will be held accountable, and Republicans can unite around what they oppose. Year 2012, however, is problematic.
Then the party must declare itself. And the reality is that the GOP remains a house divided.
What, for example, is the conservative view of the war in Iraq and the Bush economic policies that cost the party both Houses of Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008?
Why did President Bush leave with 27 percent approval? Did Bush policies the GOP once applauded have anything to do with it?
Was Bush free trade responsible for the decline of the dollar and the loss of one in four manufacturing jobs? Is globalization still good for America and NAFTA the deal of the century?
What is the conservative position on reaching out to Russia, as BarackObama has done, on bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, and on canceling that anti-missile system Bush planned in Poland?
“We’re all Georgians now!” John McCain declared. Are we?
What is the party position on a “long war” in Afghanistan?
For if America has soured on the war and opposes more troops today, will America be enthusiastic about soldiering on in 2012, after 1,000 or 2,000 more American dead have been shipped home?
Do Republicans support negotiating with Tehran, or cutting off gasoline and starting up the escalator to air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities that are today under U.N. inspection?
Will the GOP propose to stimulate the economy with tax cuts after four straight trillion-dollar deficits? Will the Bush line, “They’ll pay for themselves,” still be credible after Bush’s deficits?
If the largest federal outlays are for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, defense and interest on the debt, followed by education, housing, homeland security and transportation, where would the GOP use the knife to balance the budget?
According to Gallup, America is moving closer to the Republican position on regulations, abortion, guns and union power. But half of all Americans now favor cuts in legal immigration. Are Republicans willing to call for a moratorium on immigration to tighten the labor market and force wages up? Or does the Chamber of Commerce still call the tune?
Ronald Reagan arrived with new ideas that fit the needs of his time. Where are the Republican ideas that fit the needs of this time?
Fyodor Dostoevsky has rightly been called a prophet of the modern age. With a depth of vision unrivalled, he saw that cultural, political, and economic disorder have their main source in the crisis of the spirit.
Dostoevsky foresaw how man’s rebellion against the Transcendent would progressively accelerate into full-blown anarchy. In The Possessed, he was particularly attentive to show us the spiritual corruption of the ruling class, the so-called “conservative” elements of society. Dostoevsky wrote about Russia, but he was also deeply sensitive to the West’s descent into secularism.
Parties like the Republicans and the Tories have done nothing to arrest the decline of our societies because they ultimately share the same radical, anti-traditional principles of the Left. For evidence, look no further than Britain’s rapid transformation into a crime-ridden, multicultural surveillance state otherwise known as “Cool Britannia”, or at the mass of contradictions in the program of the new Edmund Burke Institute in Washington, DC (Richard just recently addressed both examples).
If one holds fast to the ideals of modernity, if one’s faith in sacred Progress, Equality, Democracy, Total Individual Autonomy, etc. is unshaken, opposition is meaningless and purely cosmetic. Rhetorical nods to cultural consolidation are articulated within the corrosive framework of Enlightenment rights ideology, and only for the purpose of grabbing votes. The conservative movement knows what’s really important: generous contributions from the financial and defense industries to maintain policies of corporate centralization and overseas empire.
The mainstream Right has led the West to systemic cultural collapse in full collusion with the slightly more radical Left. The Possessed reveals the spiritual and intellectual dimensions of this long process. A conversation between the story’s provincial governor, Von Lembke, and the nihilist revolutionary Peter Verkhovensky nicely encapsulates the mentality and path of modern conservatism (translation is mine):
“We have responsibilities, and as a result we also serve the common cause as you do. We are only holding back what you loosen and what without us would scatter in various directions. We’re not your enemies; hardly so. We’re saying to you: go forward, make progress, even shatter, that is, everything that is subject to alteration; but when needed, we will keep you within the necessary boundaries and save you from yourselves, because without us you would only send Russia into upheaval, depriving her of a proper appearance, and our duty is to look after proper appearances. Understand that you and I are mutually necessary to each other. In England Tories and Whigs also need each other. Now then, we’re Tories, and you’re Whigs…”
“Well, however you like it,” murmured Peter Stepanovich. “Nevertheless you are paving the way for us and preparing our success.”
Strip away the concern for proper appearances, and it becomes clear that modern conservatism is the handmaiden of revolutionary nihilism.
Every mainstream figure who opposes illegal or mass immigration never tires of informing everyone who will listen that they’d never, ever do it because of race and ethnicity. It’s all about being a “nation of laws” and protecting citizens from unfair employment competition. Apparently, many of these immigration hawks don’t even think about race, or else are positively welcoming of a demographic transformation of fading Anglo-Protestant America, provided it’s done through proper legal channels, of course.
It’s certainly right to support the rule of law, and I agree that mass immigration doesn’t, in itself, raise anyone’s standard of living. But those concerned with immigration should take note that, as revealed by Andrew Neather’s recent tell-all column in the Evening Standard, when the Left, even the moderate Left, concocts immigration policies, it’s all about race. As a friend remarked to me this weekend, average conservatives may not be interested in race, but race is interested in them.
On the heels of Nick Griffin’s appearance on the BBC comes this fascinating headline in the Telegraph:
Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser
In other news, Playboy subscribers have announced that they don’t read the magazine just for the articles.
The story continues:
The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”, according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.
He said Labour’s relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to “open up the UK to mass migration” but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its “core working class vote”.
As a result, the public argument for immigration concentrated instead on the economic benefits and need for more migrants.
Critics said the revelations showed a “conspiracy” within Government to impose mass immigration for “cynical” political reasons.
Mr Neather was a speech writer who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, in the early 2000s.
Writing in the Evening Standard, he revealed the “major shift” in immigration policy came after the publication of a policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think tank based in the Cabinet Office, in 2001.
He wrote a major speech for Barbara Roche, the then immigration minister, in 2000, which was largely based on drafts of the report.
In Monsieur Neather’s Evening Standard column, he positively revels in the little social experiment he helped concoct:
It didn’t just happen: the deliberate policy of ministers from late 2000 until at least February last year, when the Government introduced a points-based system, was to open up the UK to mass migration.
The results in London, and especially for middle-class Londoners, have been highly positive. It’s not simply a question of foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners—although frankly it’s hard to see how the capital could function without them.
Their place certainly wouldn’t be taken by unemployed BNP voters from Barking or Burnley—fascist au pair, anyone?
Translation: right-wingers and traditionalists are stupid and disgusting people who are rightly shunned from society. Those Third World migrants, on the other hand…
[T]his wave of immigration has enriched us much more than that. A large part of London’s attraction is its cosmopolitan nature.
It is so much more international now than, say, 15 years ago, and so much more heterogeneous than most of the provinces, that it’s pretty much unimaginable for us to go back either to the past or the sticks.
Field and Soames complain about schools where English is not the first language for many pupils.
But in my children’s south London primary school, the international influence is primarily the large numbers of (mostly middle-class) bilingual children, usually with one parent married to a Brit.
My children have half- or wholly Spanish, Italian, Swiss, Austrian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Congolese, Chinese and Turkish classmates.
London’s role as a magnet for immigration busted wide open the stale 1990s clichés about multiculturalism: it’s a question of genuine diversity now, not just tacking a few Afro-Caribbean and Bengali events on to a white British mainstream. It’s one of the reasons Paris now tends to look parochial to us.
If you had only read Neather’s column, and hadn’t, say, visited London, you might think your average refugee was a dashing and genteel flaneur with a famous Austrian Duke as an uncle and a habit of peppering his speech with foreign bon mots, to the delight and cultural enrichment of his hosts. And the rest are “Polish plumbers.” In Neather’s imagination, he and Tony turned London into a dazzling salon that puts old Paris to shame (a city which, by the way, has experienced much the same demographic transformation). Neather doesn’t dwell too long on who the immigrants actually are. (For your information, the vast majority of them come from the Pakistan region, followed closely by Africans and Afro-Caribbeans.) My impression upon visiting London recently was that it’s become a crime-ridden, vulgar, dysfunctional, generally unpleasant counterfeit of its former self. I probably should have stayed away and just read about “diversity” in the Evening Standard.
Neather also makes no bones about the brazen deception involved in the scheme:
But ministers wouldn’t talk about it. In part they probably realised the conservatism of their core voters: while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasn’t necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men’s clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland.
In part, too, it would have been just too metropolitan an argument to make in such places: London was the real model. [Tony Blair’s immigration minister Barbara] Roche was unusual in that she was a London MP, herself of east European Jewish stock.
But Labour ministers elsewhere tend studiously to avoid ever mentioning London. Meanwhile, the capital’s capacity to absorb new immigrants depends in large part on its economic vitality and variety. There’s not a lot of that in, say, south Yorkshire. And so ministers lost their nerve.
And as is so often the case with disastrous government projects, Blair’s immigration policy can be traced back to some highly connected think-tank that’s accountable only to the Prime Minister (the Performance and Innovation Unit) and some unelected “minister” (in this case, the adorable Miss Roche.)
In another outburst of honesty, Neather correctly states that it’s not a case of the London economy needing tons of immigrants in order to be efficient and dynamic; it’s the other way ‘round: only a pre-existing dynamic economy would be able to “absorb” millions of Third World newcomers. I don’t think I’m overstating the matter when I write that Neather is arguing against most everything everyone always tells us about immigration. (We’ve always had the horse in front of the cart here at Takimag, however.)
The line from Neather’s column that will probably go down in anti-racist lore reads,
I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended—even if this wasn’t its main purpose—to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.
It wasn’t only “the Right” who got their noses rubbed in diversity, and one hopes that the British people will make Blair, Neather, Roche, and the whole crew bewail the unintended consequences of their immigration policies.
I’m a fan of economics and of history, as well as politics, a combination that forms some very interesting cycles to research, discuss and argue on. None is so interesting than the death of great nations, for here there is always the self destruction that comes before the final breakups and invasions. As they say: Rome did not fall to the barbarians, all they did was kick in the rotting gates.
It can be safely said, that the last time a great nation destroyed itself through its own hubris and economic folly was the early Soviet Union (though in the end the late Soviet Union still died by the economic hand). Now we get the opportunity to watch the Americans do the exact same thing to themselves. The most amazing thing of course, is that they are just repeating the failed mistakes of the past. One would expect their fellow travelers in suicide, the British, to have spoken up by now, but unfortunately for the British, their education system is now even more of a joke than that of the Americans.
While taking a small breather from mouthing the never ending propaganda of recovery, never mind that every real indicator is pointing to death and destruction, the American Marxists have noticed that the French and Germans are out of recession and that Russia and Italy are heading out at a good clip themselves. Of course these facts have been wrapped up into their mind boggling non stop chant of “recovery” and hope-change-zombification. What is ignored, of course, is that we and the other three great nations all cut our taxes, cut our spending, made life easy for small business…in other words: the exact opposite of the Anglo-Sphere.
That brings us to so-called “Cap and Trade.” Never in the history of humanity has a more idiotic plan been put forward and sold with bigger lies. Energy is the key stone to any and every economy, be it man power, animal power, wood or coal or nuclear. How else does one power industry that makes human life better (unless of course its making the bombs that end that human life, but that’s a different topic). Never in history, with the exception of the Japanese self imposed isolation in the 1600s, did a government actively force its people away from economic activity and industry.
Even the Soviets never created such idiocy. The great famine of the late 1920s was caused by quite the opposite, as the Soviets collectivized farms to force peasants off of their land and into the big new factories. Of course this had disastrous results. So one must ask, are the powers that be in Washington and London degenerates or satanically evil? Where is the opposition? Where are the Republicans in America and Tories in England?
The unfortunate truth here is: the Republicans and Tories are the Menshaviks to the Democrat and Labour Bolsheviks. In other words, they are the slightly less radical fellow travellers who are to stupid to realize that once their usefulness is done, they will go the very camps they will help send the true opposition to. A more deserving lot was rarely born. Of course half of the useful idiots in the Bolshevik groupings will go to those very same camps.
One express idiocy of Cap and Trade in America will be the approximately additional $.19 per liter of gasoline, which is a rather very large increase in taxation, however indirectly. Of course this will not only hit the American working serfs in the pocket at fuel up, but will hit them in everything they buy and do, as America has almost no real rail to even partially off set the cost of transporting goods.
But how will this work itself out? Very simple and the chain of events has been worked out often enough.
First, the serfs will start to scream at the cost of fueling up and the cost of all their goods. The government, ever anxious not to take responsibility, will single out the petroleum factories and oil companies for gauging the people. They will make demands for them to cut prices, which of course means working for a loss. When plants start to close down or move overseas, they will be called racketeers and saboteurs. Their facilities will be nationalized so that the government can show them how to do things properly. Shortages will follow as will show trials and that’s as long as the USD holds up and foreign nations are still willing to sell oil and gasoline for other than gold, silver and other hard resources.
When food goes up, and it surely will, as the diesel the farmer uses goes up as well as his fertilizers, the government will scream that the farmers are hording, thus undermining the efforts of the enlightened. There will be confiscations of all feed crops while the farmers will get production quotas to meet or have their land nationalized again. Do not believe me? Look at the people running your governments and ask yourself: would they rather take some one’s land or admit that they screwed up and ruined everything? After a point, only the corporate farms will remain, food by oligarch, just a like the factory farms. There will be plenty of dissidents to work them.
This will of course spread from industry to industry and within a rather short order, you will be living the new fractional dream, that is a fraction of what you have now. But on the bright side, for once, your children, working for government/oligarch run joint ventures, will be able to compete adequately with the Chinese, to feed the demands of Europe and Latin America. But that will take at least a generation or two first along with a cultural revolution or two.
From Mat Rodina
Apart from “rogue” politicians like Geert Wilders, Europeans leaders seem only willing to speak of the problem of dismal birth rates in the Old World by resorting to euphemism and wishful thinking. Faced with its disastrous postcolonial migration policies, the guilt-ridden establishment is only interested in maintaining domestic peace and order, when (not if) Europeans become ethnic minorities in their own lands.
It hasn’t always been this way. Modern European states, both democratic and authoritarian, have periodically attempted to boost indigenous population growth, especially after manmade catastrophes. France did it after the First World War and the USSR after the Second.
The USSR’s pro-natalist experience hasn’t been forgotten. What today’s Russia shares with “Europe-proper” is a quasi-colonial past and a poor demographic present. However, rather than mimicking Europe’s defeatism, the Russian government not only took the proverbial bull by the horns, but also forced it to mate!
The Soviet Union is peculiar case study because its social policy rapidly changed in the first decades of its existence. Immediately after the Bolshevik takeover, the state tried to closely adhere to Marxist ideology by legalizing abortion, establishing simpler divorce procedures, and promoting the “new woman,” among other measures. Certain hardcore communist feminists like Alexandra Kollontai rejected morality altogether. However, by and large, people avoided this adventurism and chose to preserve families as socio-economic units.
If the 1920s were a failed attempt to implement Marxist immorality, then the 1930s demonstrated a successful turn toward social conservatism. Abortion was banned, and divorce became more difficult to obtain. The government began rewarding women with multiple children—the so-called “heroic mothers,” who rescued the nation after the fertility drop as a result of collectivization, industrialization, and consequent famines.
Soviet “public service” posters reflected these changes. One 1930 advertisment, for example, urged women to take care of their breasts. A more subtle 1934 poster emphasized honest peasant labor by depicting a happy nuclear Slavic family. After 1945, the government attempted to make up for the near thirty-million population loss due to war and labor camps. And so, posters like “Grow, warrior! The Soviet Army protects you!” were used, featuring a blond Slavic baby underneath the red Communist flag.
Beautiful blond Slavic babies appear in contemporary Russian pro-natalist advertising, too. It emerged in May of 2006, when Vladimir Putin had made Russia’s demographic crisis problem Number One. A year prior, the net human decrease in this country amounted to an alarming six hundred thousand people. At this rate, Russia is projected to lose 11 million people by 2025. Not unlike the case of “heroic mothers” of the past, he proposed to reverse depopulation pragmatically: better social services for new mothers, additional funding for multi-child families, a substantial amount of capital in the form of investments into children’s future education, and so on.
Putin’s critics immediately suggested that women might start reproducing out of greed, and they argued that Putin’s programs would lead to misleading short-term population boosts. Furthermore, they urged the government to address the poor health of the aging population, particularly men, whose life expectancy is at least a decade less than that of men in Western Europe and North America.
In 2008, Russia’s pro-natalism resulted in record birth rates—the highest since the Soviet Union’s collapse. However, while these measures have been covered by the media, two crucial aspects of Putin’s plan have been consistently ignored. First, this plan involves a significant cultural initiative which feeds into Russian traditions and contemporary advertising methods alike. Most important, this plan specifically targets people of European descent.
My temporary relocation to Moscow to conduct dissertation research has given me the opportunity to observe this sweeping initiative “live.” In general, the state offers its citizens cultural celebrations, secular federal and Eastern Orthodox Christian holidays, soccer matches, city jubilees, historic blockbuster films, military parades—all in the name of the Motherland. Russians are left with a sense of a glorious past—the kind of past that Western and American academic and government institutions are constantly telling us is outdated and oppressive.
More specifically, Russians are also rather conservative when it comes to marriage and children, despite the high divorce rate. So, it’s not surprising that the subjects of demographics, child rearing, a woman’s traditional role in the home, and even adoptions and surrogate motherhood receive extensive coverage in countless television miniseries, soaps, silly gossip talk shows, serious political programs, and “public service” advertising on major state-funded channels. For example, eligible bachelorettes and bachelors on a popular award-winning show “Let’s Get Married!” on state channel 1 systematically mention a multi-child family as their primary goal for resorting to television dating.
Yet, the most explicit pro-natalist messages appear within the confines of the 75-year old architectural wonder of the world—the Moscow metro system. This type of advertising grabs the attention of over six million people (90% of users), according to the recent study conducted by TNS Gallup Media. Long escalator rides deep underground and even longer commutes across the city make billboards on walls and posters inside trains simply unavoidable.
One frequently encountered advertisement features colorful matryoshka nesting dolls and reads, “’Love for the Motherland begins with family’—F. Bacon.”
Another billboard is a photograph of good-looking European grandparents, parents, and children enjoying the outdoors together and captioned with, “’Family is one of nature’s masterpieces’—Philosopher George Santayana.” The most distinct feature of both ads is the fact that they don’t simply depict happy nuclear families, but, rather, emphasize genetic and historic continuity through multi-generational family “clans.”
The most overt image in this campaign states that “The country needs our records. Every minute, three people are born in Russia” and shows a young Slavic woman holding three blond, blue-eyed babies. While enormous Moscow is quite multiethnic, here, too, the government’s demographic target market is very clear.
Whether this country’s current pro-natalist experiment, in conjunction with the recent anti-alcohol and anti-smoking campaigns, achieves significant results remains to be seen. But for those concerned with the “Death of West,” some comfort can be found in the fact that what is taboo in western Europe and America is a national priority in the Motherland.
Elizabeth Wright’s excellent piece on the Southern Poverty Law Center gives me a great opportunity to plug one of my all time favorite articles. Published nine years ago by Harpers Magazine, “The Church of Morris Dees” was written by the excellent investigative reporter Ken Silverstein. Despite his leftist politics, Silverstein’s article has become a strong reference point for right wing critics of the SPLC and has remained online almost entirely due to the efforts of immigration restrictionists and other SPLC-defined “hate groups.” Those unfamiliar with it should give it a look.
Yesterday afternoon, in the last of his appearances during his just ended trip to the United States, Geert Wilders addressed a private luncheon at the Union League Club in Philadelphia. According to a source in Philadelphia who was at the lunch, Wilders at the end of the speech announced a plan to form an international organization, the purpose of which will be “to break the chains of political correctness and cultural relativism.” Wilders said that everywhere he goes people ask him, “What can we do?”, “How can we help?”, “What can we join?”, and that it was in response to these questions that he has decided to take this initiative.
This is profoundly important news. To understand its significance, let us consider again, based on Wilders’s talk that I heard earlier this week in New York City, what Wilders stands for, and thus what this new international organization will stand for:
(1) Islam is the problem (not “radical Islam,” “radical extreme Islam,” or “Islamo-fascism”).
(2) While individual Muslims may be moderate, there is no such thing as moderate Islam.
(3) Islam is in part a religion but is primarily a tyrannical ideology aimed at controlling the world.
(4) The more Muslims there are in a non-Muslim society, the greater becomes the power of sharia, the Islamic law, which requires that all aspects of society be brought under its control.
(5) Wilders says that he has nothing against Muslims as people, and that Muslims who support the freedoms and the culture of their host societies in the West are welcome; but that those who do not, are not.
(6) All mass Muslim immigration to Western countries must be ended.
(7) Muslims in the West who promote sharia should be made to leave, “today.”
That is an extraordinary list of statements and positions. An international organization formed on these principles, and aimed at bringing them into the politics of each Western country, is exactly what is needed. It would represent, for the first time, the beginning of a serious effort to defend the West from Islamization.
But now an interesting question arises.
The anti-jihad conservatives who support Wilders and who have enthusiastically received him in his recent trips to America, have never taken the positions on Islam that Wilders takes—that moderate Islam does not exist, that Islam itself (not “radical” Islam) is the problem, and that all Muslim immigration should be stopped. In fact, their positions have tended to be the opposite of his. Up to this point they seem to have dealt with the contradiction by lauding and embracing the man, while remaining silent about his stands. But now that Wilders is creating an international organization devoted to advancing his ideas, his ideas that are, let us make no bones about it, radical compared to current accepted beliefs, the anti-jihad conservatives will be forced to make a choice: either to endorse the platform and support the work of the West’s most prominent and effective jihad opponent, or else to declare that it, and he, are too extreme for them.
Let us hope that Wilders’s seminal announcement will be the spark that finally galvanizes the reluctant Islam critics into adopting a serious anti-Islam position, and thus unites the various forces that are fighting this fight. I look forward to Wilders’s next move on this front.
From View From the Right
The response to the HL Mencken Club‘s second annual meeting (modestly entitled “We Are Doomed!”) has been tremendous. A week away from the event, well over 100 people have pre-registered. It’s sure to be a great crowd, and if you’ve ever wanted to see in the flesh many of the writers associated with Takimag (Pat Buchanan, John Derbyshire, Paul Gottfried, Kevin Gutzman, Tom Piatak, Steve Sailer, Thomas E. Woods, Jr., and Christian Kopff among them), you probably won’t have a better chance than this Halloween weekend. I don’t often boast, but in less than two years time, the HLMC board has created the largest alternative right-wing group in the country. The demand for such an organization is clearly high, and after this year’s success, we’ll be able to expand our programing in the coming years.
I also have some mixed news to pass on. Peter Brimelow, pictured below, will not be able to join us this year.
The good news is that we’ve replaced him with this man:
Just in case you don’t recognize him, that’s John Brimelow, Peter’s twin brother.
Peter and I considered just not telling anyone he couldn’t make it and have his twin brother impersonate him at the podium. This might have worked, but Peter worried that John might say something too radical and spoil Peter’s reputation for tolerance and moderation.
John will be speaking on a very interesting topic: “The Rise and Fall of ‘Chimerica.’” He’ll discuss the importance of currency exchange rates and how Wall Street and Beijing have worked together to create an economic arrangement that’s been highly detrimental to Main Street and the American middle class. I greatly look forward to this talk!
In future conferences, we might get both Brimelows to come, but only list one Brimelow on the program. This way, a Brimelow could end his speech by climbing into a magical-looking box on stage and then the other Brimelow could miraculously reappear in a flash at the back of the room.
As I said, we have big plans for the HL Mencken Club. Big plans.
I like being right. And I also learned quite a bit from Dylan’s blog on the Front Porch Republic. (Daniel McCarthy has also done some good work critiquing these guys.)
I’ll be sure to needle Patrick Deenen about his “big government localism” when he comes to speak at the HL Mencken Club next weekend. As for “The ‘One Salvation’ of Ludwig von Mises”... The Front Porch Republic fact-checking department might want to look into John Médaille’s assertions about Tom Woods’s corporate funding and his friendship with Michael Novak and the gang at AIE. The story of Murray Rothbard’s conversion to Catholicism is also something I did not encounter in any of the major biographies…
I became extremely skeptical of the whole “crunchy” second wave of social conservatism after I read that Alan Carlson had made a “conservative” case for the New Deal, a meme picked up by Ross Douthat, among others, and after I heard Carlson speak at Yale last year at an ISI sponsored event. He used terms like the (state-directed) “re-distribution of property” and proposed government programs to increase home ownership among the lower and middle classes that sounded like wispy, Russell Kirk-y versions of the ones that created the housing debacle. I’m sure Deneen, Carlson, and I share a similar abiding respect for the Old America of strong, closely knit, and independent families, upright social and economic dealings, and a certain crusty skepticism I associate with my maternal grandfather. Unlike these two, however, I think getting the bureaucrats involved is the worst possible way of reviving this lost world.
Also, Deneen and Carlson seem to be fellow travelers with those “pragmatic” and “moderate” conservatives and neocons who feel that it’s probably impossible and undesirable to shrink government, and thus we should work on reforms that promote a “conservative” (or in this case, “localist”) welfare state. I have a very different take. With 12 trillion in debt and 50-100 trillion of unfunded entitlement liabilities, I think it’s near certain that in the coming decade the American welfare state will collapse in a big hyperinflationary Götterdämmerrung. It would seem more “pragmatic” to start developing alternative, independent institutions outside the state that can endure, and not just work to be yet another Beltway rent-seeker.
In other news, George Hawley of “post right” picked up on my post about this horrible Edmund Burke Institute in Washington, DC, and made an observation worth repeating:
When Big Government liberals tell conservatives they need to be more like Burke, they mean conservatives should be gracious losers – this is hardly an accurate description of Burke himself, but I digress. In their mind, a “Burkean” Right is one that provides only minor speed bumps on America’s road to a centrally-planned utopia; to them, the ideal conservative is an erudite gentleman who pontificates for a few minutes, and then gets out of the way. They prefer conservatives like George Will, who bristle at any perceived “populism” on the Right, and they despise figures who would channel conservative anger into an effective political movement that actually threatens the present state of affairs.
This is very much the impression I got reading Sam Tannenhaus’s The Death of Conservatism
There’s something about reading Sam Tannenhaus that makes me want to defend Rush Limbaugh…
Of course, from another angle Sam Tannenhaus is himself a Burkean conservative—and we should treat him as such—in that he is an active defender of America’s ruling class and left-liberal establishment, of its education system, civic values, and public religion
For the most part, the value of the dollar is given cursory attention by the financial media. Typically, its movements are assigned an importance on par with much less determinative metrics such as natural gas futures and construction permits. It’s only when major milestones are reached that anyone really takes notice of the dollar. We are living through one of those times.
The great dollar rally of 2008-2009 has come full circle. When the financial crisis exploded in its full ugliness in mid-2008, the dollar, which had steadily declined over the previous four to five years, put in a rally for the record books. By March 2009, as investors across the world sought safety from the financial storm, the index had surged more than 25%. Since then, the dollar has steadily declined to the point where nearly all those gains have vanished. In short, the panic rally has given way to the long term trend.
So, as the dollar index makes fresh 52-week lows on a nearly daily basis, discussion on the greenback is heating up. And while real insight on the topic is hard to find, the debate centers on the battle between two conventional opinions—both of which are wrong.
The first camp, which is generally supportive of government intervention in the economy, argues that dollar’s decline is a positive for both the economy and the stock market. The second camp, which tends to fall on the more conservative end of the political spectrum, views the dollar’s decline as a problem but feels that tough talk and slightly higher interest rates are all that is needed to restore “King Dollar” to its throne.
First of all, a weak dollar is no better for Americans than a lower paying job is for a worker. And although I would prefer that the dollar remain strong, I know that currency values are a function of supply and demand, not wishful thinking. The past years of reckless monetary and fiscal policy have created conditions that must push the dollar down. Vastly expanded debt levels and monetary expansion have created a greater supply of dollars, while poor investment performance and diminished industrial capacity have lessened the demand for dollars.
The regrettable truth is that while the weak dollar will help rebalance the global economy, it is not a panacea for the U.S. The fall is no more worthy of celebration than a student celebrating falling grades on his report card. If the dollar does not recover eventually, Americans will suffer diminished living standards. To avoid this we must make difficult reforms now. If we continue our current policies, we run the risk of a complete dollar collapse. Far from helping to solve our problems, this would be a true nightmare scenario.
On the other side of the argument, those who correctly equate a weaker dollar with a weaker America mistakenly believe that mere posturing by officials or trivial rate hikes would be sufficient to restore the dollar’s lost vitality. We are long past that point. The best we can do now is to accept the penalty of a weaker dollar as punishment for our prior failures, and start building for the future.
To save our currency, the Fed must get very aggressive with interest rate hikes and reign in the supply of dollars that have flooded the world over the past few years. The federal government must also do its part by cutting spending, which means no more stimulus and no more bailouts. Undoubtedly, these actions will have unpleasant economic and political consequences. A student who studies harder may have to miss a party or two. A simple analogy, but unfortunately it is that simple.
Even in the unlikely event that our political leaders take these courageous steps, the near-term trajectory of the dollar may still be uncertain. A dollar rally that results from higher interest rates and a narrowing federal deficit may soon fade as the recessionary forces that such moves would unleash act to weaken the dollar once again. But at least we would be building a foundation upon which the dollar could eventually find some footing.
With a restructured economy, higher savings, more capital investment, lower government deficits, and higher interest rates, the United States would once again attract international investment. Funds would flow here not out of fear, as they did last year, but out of confidence. The dollar’s strength would not rest on the willingness of foreign governments to buy our debt, but the willingness of foreign consumers to buy our products.
Only then could King Dollar regain its throne.
If you needed incontrovertible proof that homegrown retardation is far more pressing a problem than homegrown terrorism in modern-day America—six-year-old Falcon Heene’s flight of fancy provided it.
The contagion that gripped the nation began on October the 15th. Anyone turning on the boob tube was treated to a live broadcast of a levitating dome-shaped “homemade flying saucer.”
MSNBC’s David “Shyster” informed his unfortunate viewers, matter-of-fact, that the small son of Richard and Mayumi Heene of Fossil Ridge Road in Fort Collins, Colorado, had climbed into a carriage attached to the helium-filled contraption which had become untethered. Boy and balloon were now scaling heights of 10,000 feet.
Indeed, nowhere was the madness more apparent than on MSNBC.
Like most of the unisex males of the left-liberal media, “girlie-boy” Shuster was flooded with emotions which he did not hesitate to share. Shuster would prefer that you forget—and he is working hard to—but the anchor devoted two full hours to tracking the imaginary “Falcon,” as he soared through the Centennial State’s skies in a rickety grey floatation device.
Other TV entertainment outlets masquerading as news media hawked the Falcon pie-in-the-sky as fact. If anything, both the authorities and the media proceeded from the premise that Falcon was in fact flying two miles above them, rather than hiding somewhere on terra firma.
When you’re slothful, stout, and stupid, it’s easier to look to the heavens than search high-and-low below.
With the blind belief reserved for all women who allege date rape (but especially for black strippers who claim to have been gangbanged by white honor students)—the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office Spokes Skirt dogmatically asserted that there was no doubt in her mind that the boy was flying high. Sheriff Jim Alderden backed her. This family (of actors) behaved, as he put it, in a believable manner. Cable channels then ran with the factoid.
By now everyone knows that the boy never took off; that the farce was a planned promotional stunt; that father Richard Heene is uneducated—an amateur actor, a skilled grafter and a self-styled storm chaser who sought extramarital spice on the reality soft porn “WifeSwap.” A Google search, or some old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism, would have revealed something about the man’s dysfunctional biography.
Yet all it took to convince the gaseous Shuster of the genuine and ingenious nature of his subject was the sight of the sophisticated “vessel,” held together with duct tape and filled with inert gas.
In the adjectival ejaculate that followed, Shuster included favorable comments about the Heene family’s quirky lifestyle: how interesting they were; how spontaneous, adventurous, and devoted to science and mysticism (a contradiction, if I’m not mistaken). Shameless Schuster even reached for the mad genius cliché to describe a man—Mr. Heene—who turned out to be anything but.
The Christian parents of a home-schooled child gone airborne would never have been fawned upon but held up to scorn. I wager that our besotted boob and his extremely limited co-host, Tamron Hall, would be calling on the department of child abduction (also known as social services).
The following day, Schuster was not ready to hang his empty head in shame. Instead, he proceeded to blame the sheriff for leading him and his clever colleagues astray. For his part, Sheriff Alderden has not resigned. Driven, indubitably, by fury at his own incompetence, Alderden is, however, intent on visiting the full force of the law upon the family.
If Falcon was exhibiting the symptoms of severe stress—vomiting during the press and TV performances his grease ball of a dad had lined up—wait until the vampiric tele-child advocate Wendy Murphy gets her way and the three Heene children are made wards of the state.
As the day wore on, Schuster and Hall turned to more meaty matters. Still on the topic of balloons, the two offered up hosannas to Meghan McCain, who had plastered a grotesque image of her exposed appendages on Twitter.
McCain, a licentious, self-adoring, dense liberal, kept up the momentum by penning a Daily-Beast paean to her beloved beasties. For her narcissistic efforts, the dull MSNBC duo pronounced Megan McCain a “strong conservative woman.”
The reams of verbiage these two flaccid folks had devoted to the esoteric family that fell from grace were diverted in no time to the mindless McCain.
Last night my older son, who unlike me is a Bush-McCain Republican, called to express his alarm that the Obama administration is using, in the words of Michael Barone, “brass knuckles” and “thuggery” to intimidate FOX-news. It appears that David Axelrod and Rahm Emmanuel have badmouthed the neocon-Murdoch empire; moreover, like their boss, they are hesitating to give FOX reporters the same access in presidential interviews as they would give to friendlier news sources. Apparently this is seen as the first step in closing down the “conservative” opposition, and my Republican relatives and acquaintances are trembling in horror over the coming leftist totalitarian order.
This fear is of course greatly exaggerated. Not only is the government not closing down FOX. This channel seems to be thriving by posing as the beleaguered American Right, which is fighting for freedom against the radical Left. Never mind, that Krauthammer and other news contributors were swooning over the symbolism of Obama’s election for weeks after the event—and continuously congratulating the country for having overcome its racist heritage. Now these “conservatives” presumably know better, particularly since the GOP is not in power, and their multibillion dollar media operation claims to be fighting on our behalf for the American way of life.
I am conflicted by this situation. Emotionally I’m with anyone who wants to destroy FOX, which has diligently and steadily worked to isolate our side. My view of the present conflict is similar to that of a Russian White watching the Stalinists and Trotskyists fight it out. (Actually I did have a horse in that contest, in which the less dangerous side won.) Why should one care if one’s implacable enemies are having a street fight? As a member of the Old Right, I despise both sides about equally, but perhaps the neocons a bit more. After all, they were the ones who successfully marginalized us, with the assistance of their liberal friends.
The pity is that we can’t get rid of these successful interlopers on the American right. A loss for them against the administration would mean very little. It would mean that FOX employees would be made to go to the back of the line at Obama’s press conferences. The concern that the Fairness Doctrine would be reintroduced by Congress in order to neuter the opposition does not seem to be based on much at all, at least at the present time. All the administration has done is to demote FOX relative to other news sources. Further, I can’t see why our side should give a damn even if the Fairness Doctrine is brought back. We are the only ones whom FOX has pushed off the stage. We’d have nothing to lose and everything to gain if FOX were required to include the now excluded Right in its conversation with the Left.
What is even more upsetting is that the more the administration criticizes FOX, the greater will become its hold on right-of-center Americans. In my ideal world FOX and the rest of the neocon empire would sink into the ocean but this is not going to happen. What is happening is that our enemies are growing more influential by hallucinating about the threat that they’re facing. For this reason alone, I wish that the Democrats would leave the neocons alone. Their disparaging remarks are allowing our more immediate enemies to tighten their grip on much of the American public. This public may be lost to us forever if this phony war goes on.
To ensure Takimag readers remain the web’s most informed, I wanted to share some recent headlines I caught while browsing the news sites:
From Fox:
Northeast endures chilly weekend, climate change scientists silent
Yankees lose to Angels just days after Obama’s NY fundraiser
Did Soupy Sales die early to escape death panels?
Meanwhile, over at CNN:
As cold front hits northeast, how are Latinos handling the space heater gap?
Anaheim’s changing demographics bring challenges, late inning baseball heroics
Death of old white guy paves way for Wanda Sykes
Regular readers of this magazine may recall a minor internal spat that occurred a few months ago, concerning the then new Front Porch Republic website. I wholly endorsed the project, which was followed immediately by a long piece from Richard that focused on the vague language used to promote the site and the implicit statism of some of its better known contributors. The dispute - if one could call it that - was an amicable one that ended in a podcast debate whereby Richard and I agreed to disagree on certain facets of the FPR program.
Though it pains me to condemn any site that would regularly publish the work of Bill Kauffman, Kirkpatrick Sale and Daniel Larison, two pieces that appeared on the Porch this week have left me wondering whether or not I can seriously disagree with the initial criticisms Richard spoke of months ago.
The first essay that gave me pause was by Patrick Deneen. Entitled “Subsidizing Localism?” the brief posting quotes favorably the musings of another blogger who suggested that “the localism versus globalism debate is about what we should subsidize rather than whether we should subsidize, period.” To the blogger’s comments, Deneen added:
In my view, the problem is not simply that we currently have a powerful centralized government, but that its orientation is toward supporting BIGNESS in the form of private concentration of power (which in turn reinforces its public power). While in theory it would be better to have neither public nor private concentrations of power, at this point in our history it is the public power that is at least theoretically more capable of responding to public demands, even a sustained public demand to restrict these sorts of concentrations of power.
As a person who has summed up his entire political philosophy with the mantra “Bigger is Badder” I can certainly sympathize with Deneen’s reflexive opposition to the corporate state. In fact, one of the more contentious moments in my debate with Richard occurred when I recycled the Jerry Mander inspired, neo-Luddite argument that technology was dangerously undemocratic and inherently trended toward the centralization of power. After audibly guffawing at my populist naiveté, Richard responded by thanking the heavens that technology wasn’t subject to the foolish whims of King Numbers, a counterpoint that was not without merit.
Nonetheless I retain a suspicion of “progress” that extends beyond the liberal managerial state and remain an enemy of obese institutions regardless of whether or not they are public or private. Bigness is my primary rival. Having said that, there is something uniquely dangerous about trusting the public institutions to curtail the Bigness of the private institutions, by way of making the public institutions bigger and stronger than they already are. Setting aside the obvious contradictions, the very notion of expanding the powers of the allegedly more accountable public sphere is the bedrock principle upon which globalism rests.
Whatever one may say about the denizens of the Front Porch, I have always seen them as wholesale opponents of one-worldism and all of if its trappings. Falling back on Chomskyesque arguments about using the power of bureaucrats to rollback the Wal-Martizaton of small town America is a recipe for disaster. If the Front Porchers think that local custom and tradition is getting box-stored-to-death now—imagine how bad it would be under a multicultural regime adorned with the rubber stamp of broad based representative democracy. As Gabriel Kolko noted a half a century ago, the triumph of corporatism was the end result of the Progressive Era. For the most part, Mom and Pop didn’t survive the regulatory state. The therapeutic state would bury them once and for all.
Even worse than Deneen’s misguided endorsement of government subsidized localism (that’s real autonomy there!) is the most recent offering from the fundamentalist Distributist John Medaille. A long time critic of libertarian economics, Medaille has taken the next step in “The One Salvation of Ludwig von Mises” where he seems to argue that Michael Novak, Murray Rothbard (?!?) and Thomas Woods are all insufficiently Catholic because of their advocacy of the irreligious von Mises. Though not stated clearly (nothing in the essay is) the implication seems to be that Novak - a well known neocon symp - is an adherent of the Austrian School of Economics. The American Enterprise Institute is also invoked as a kindred spirit of Woods and Rothbard and in the comments section below the original piece Medaille states that the Miseans are all “fellow travelers on the road to collectivization.”
I am not a libertarian per se, but the argument that minarchists or anarcho-capitalists are useful idiots for the State strikes me as a remarkably dishonest one. In point of fact, Medaille’s essay - like Deneen’s - seems to be a strange backdoor advocacy of statism, whereby the actual critics of state power are condemned as utopian fools unwittingly doing the devils work, while the sufficiently Catholic/localist crowd grovels for crumbs from a federal leviathan whose power it is happy to use for pet projects. That this sort of duplicity is not uncommon in politics does not make its emergence on a once promising webzine any less troubling.
The term “social engineering” never fit an entity better than it does the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). This intrusive, tenacious organization has spent years attempting to recast and transform American society to fit its own peculiar ideals. Its directors are missionaries in the full sense of the word, in that they relentlessly work to stamp onto the hearts and minds of the public a distinctive belief system, which teaches what is evil and what is not.
This month, the Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR) has published an excellent analysis of the SPLC’s attack on FAIR and other immigration reform groups, entitled, Guide to Understanding the Tactics of the Southern Poverty Law Center in the Immigration Debate. It offers much-needed insights. Besides giving the ordinary citizen an opportunity to view the insides of this “watchdog” group, the report should become a reference guide for members of the media, who generally take the easy way out when covering stories about race and/or immigration.
Reporters, editorialists, and feature writers are notorious for accepting, without further investigation, reams of data and materials disseminated to them by a cluster of self-appointed overseers of American society, among the most prominent, the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the NAACP, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. [See also here and here.]
Thanks to the fawning acceptance granted them by the establishment media, these groups, and several more like them, have acquired an almost quasi-governmental status in the public mind. When they spread lies, there are few people who will risk inevitable public denigration and stand up to challenge them. In regard to the SPLC, FAIR’s new report does just that.
FAIR was founded in 1979, and is the country’s largest immigration reform group. It has more than 250,000 members whose aims are to improve border security, stop illegal immigration, and promote immigration levels consistent with the national interest. Sensible immigration reform would enhance national security, improve the economy, preserve our environment, and protect jobs for American citizens.
Such goals have earned FAIR the designation of a “hate” group by the SPLC. Other immigration reform organizations have also incurred the wrath of the SPLC. They include, but are not limited to, the two next largest groups, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and Numbers USA. These groups are reputable organizations that handle in a respectful manner what has become a volatile subject. Yet, the SPLC makes it clear that any individual or group that emphasizes the need for immigration reform of any kind is a “hater” and, hence, an enemy of American society.
Although the SPLC claims to take no position on immigration policy, for more than a decade it has acted as a bully by attacking citizens who even suggest that our borders should be monitored, or that the immigration population should be limited. According to the FAIR guide, “In countless articles and ‘investigative reports,’ the SPLC concluded that just about everyone actively opposed to amnesty and mass immigration was a ‘nativist’ a ‘white supremacist,’ or had ties to such groups and individuals.”
The SPLC is well known for its ever-growing list of “hate groups” and individual “haters,” often referred to as the SPLC’s “hit list.” Lacking an objective criteria for what constitutes “hate,” the SPLC uses its own inscrutable standards. There are some hints, however, that point to a consistency in its multicultural emphasis. Not satisfied with customary, voluntary activity between races, its directors give the impression that they would like to engineer more aggressive policies, in order to bring about greater racial interaction.
In the SPLC’s universe, race and how one deals with it, is an important component in determining who is good and who is bad. In order to put the full kibosh on perceived enemies, the SPLC will slap the “racist” tag on them, just for good measure. This was never clearer than in the case of the Mormon polygamous sect in Eldorado, Texas, where, last year, over 400 children were temporarily kidnapped by the government and removed from their parents. With all the troubles faced by these people in just trying to navigate around the intrusions by outsiders, in coping with a system they did not understand, the SPLC had to come along and declare the group “racist.”
In trying to figure out the SPLC’s bizarre intervention in this case, one might wonder if the charge of racism was based on the early history of the Mormon church (the sect still adheres to the church’s early beliefs on race) or, given the SPLC’s propensity for racial meddling, was the charge based on the fact that the men in this sect apparently had no colored wives? Might the lack of any bi-racial children disturb these diversity-minded social engineers?
SPLC leaders are relentless in their venomous attacks on those who they claim try to “retreat from the government and press.” On the SPLC “hate” list, there are dozens of little religious groups that do not subscribe to establishment religion. Some believe in their group’s special “chosenness” by the Deity. They each wish to have the freedom to worship in accord with their beliefs. You know, exercising the kind of freedom that Americans possessed in an earlier time—even to living separately, if they so determined—before it became mandatory to stay in view of the government and the press.
Groups like the ADL and SPLC, however, refuse to leave such gatherings alone. Instead, these religious sects (some with only a handful of members) are added to “hate” lists and brought to the attention of the public. Members of such faiths are suspect, not for their peculiar doctrines, but because, according to the “watchdogs,” no citizens should be allowed to operate on the outside or fringe of what is considered “mainstream” society. Outsiders who prefer to behave in such a manner are clearly not engaging in “inclusive” practices and, hence, could very well be haters of members of other groups and, therefore, “dangerous.”
This is the heart of the SPLC philosophy that it conveys in its massive, annual fundraising mailings to thousands of subscribers, in which fearful scenarios are painted of a society ridden with racists, xenophobes, and potential domestic terrorists.
This month, black Professor Carol Swain of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, made the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hit list. Deemed an “apologist for white supremacists” by SPLC’s Mark Potok, Swain earned this ad hominem attack because she had dared to offer a favorable review of the documentary film, A Conversation About Race. [See my review here.]
The film, produced by Craig Bodeker, is focused on interviews with a diverse group of people of various ages and ethnic backgrounds. They each get to offer their opinions on the “racism” that they supposedly observe in the world around them. It is Bodeker’s suspicion that genuine racism in today’s America is a “myth.” Many of the responses offered by the interviewees in this film confirm his hunch, though inadvertently. In spite of the SPLC’s attempt to shame her, Professor Swain stands by her assertion that Bodeker’s film would be useful in classrooms to stimulate honest discussions on the subject of race.
It is understandable why the SPLC does not want the Bodeker film, or anything like it, disseminated too widely. The results of the interviews, right from the mouths of ethnics themselves, suggest that blacks are not held back by a pernicious white racism.
For its purposes, the SPLC does not want America’s race story shifted away from that of black victimology—that is, the tale of blacks caught in a system that prevents them from improving their circumstances in a racist society. After all, where would that leave the SPLC and its ability to raise those millions of dollars annually in the name of “social injustice?”
Pictured: The SPLC’s Poverty Palace
If racism is not preventing a black person from going about his business, or living his daily life as he chooses, and places no life-threatening obstacles in his path, as in the days of a 1930s sharecropper, then what are we talking about?
Those who are familiar with the history of the SPLC know that this organization does not seek honesty. Like its other counterparts, it is determined to remain entrenched in its self-appointed role as caretaker and guardian of Americans’ thoughts and social habits. Professor Swain is yet another target to have encountered the SPLC’s tactic of character assassination. In the coming days we will learn to what extent it will follow through with its usual “link and smear” maneuvers and poisonous press releases. (Of course, as a vocal critic of open borders immigration policies, Swain could never win the approval of the SPLC.)
The FAIR guide cites several investigative articles that have been done on the SPLC. They include critical pieces in The Nation, Harper’s, and the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser newspaper. Each describes how the SPLC skews, exaggerates and manipulates data to fit its biased perspectives on race, along with information about its questionable fundraising tactics.
As the FAIR guide suggests, an honest analysis of the immigration issue is possible if, after receiving press releases and other data from SPLC directors, journalists would feel obligated to test the accuracy of their information, question their motives, seek out responses to their allegations about other citizens and, most primary, distinguish between advocacy and news reporting.
Four decades ago, Lamar Alexander worked in Richard Nixon’s White House. Sen. Alexander today says Barack Obama’s White House reminds him of that place, that time, that mindset and those people.
Intending no disrespect to my old colleague, these days are not at all like those days, and this president and White House are nothing like the White House in which this writer worked from Inauguration Day 1969 to August 1974, when Marine One lifted off the lawn.
Richard Nixon had been elected in the most turbulent year since the Civil War.
Between New Hampshire and November, there was the Tet Offensive, LBJ’s announcement he would not run again, the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, race riots in 100 cities and Washington, D.C., the takeover of Columbia University by radicals, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, a Democratic convention in Chicago marked by rancor inside the hall and police-radical confrontations outside, and a campaign in which Hubert Humphrey was shouted down at rallies until he agreed to a bombing halt in Vietnam.
No, these times are not those times.
Nixon took the oath as a minority president, 43 percent, in a hostile city, with both houses of Congress against him and a national press corps that had loathed him since he exposed the establishment golden boy Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, 20 years before.
Obama took the oath with close to a filibuster-proof Senate, a near 80-seat majority in the House, the media at his feet, not his throat, and a city in adulation that had voted 93 to 7 for Barack Hussein Obama.
Not even JFK entered office with more goodwill.
While Obama inherited an economic situation far worse than did Nixon, Nixon inherited a war far more divisive and bloody than Iraq and Afghanistan combined, with 535,000 troops in Vietnam or on the way, and 200 soldiers coming home every week in caskets and body bags.
By October 1969, Nixon had ordered 100,000 troops home from Vietnam, proposed a Family Assistance Plan, enunciated a new Nixon Doctrine, welcomed the Apollo 11 astronauts home from the moon and become the first President to visit a communist country, Romania.
Obama has held a beer summit and won a Nobel Peace Prize.
In both October and November of 1969, 500,000 demonstrators marched on Washington to—in the words of David Broder—“break Richard Nixon” as they had broken Lyndon Johnson.
Wrote Broder, “The likelihood is great that they will succeed again.”
“Instead of making pronouncements about not being the first U.S. president to lose a war,” admonished Time, “Nixon would perform a better service by preparing the country for the trauma of distasteful reversal”—i.e, a U.S. defeat.
Nixon answered the demonstrators and their media auxiliaries with a Nov. 3. speech calling on “the Great Silent Majority” to stand with him and against those out to destroy his policy and presidency.
When the three networks—primary sources of news for two-thirds of the nation then—trashed his speech, Nixon authorized a counterattack by Vice President Agnew, which caused an avalanche of telegrams to pour into ABC, CBS and NBC denouncing them, in solidarity with the administration.
By December, it was not Nixon who was broken. Antiwar activists never mustered those numbers again, and the media had been exposed as out of touch with Middle America.
That month, Nixon rose to near 70 percent approval, and Agnew was the third most admired man in America, after Nixon and Billy Graham.
Nixon and Agnew had not wanted the fight, they had not started the fight, but they had not backed down—and they had won the fight.
What were they supposed to do, Lamar? And when has Obama encountered anything like that?
Lamar left the White House in mid-1970 and decries Agnew’s depiction of Albert Gore Sr., of his home state of Tennessee, as “the Southern regional chairman of the Eastern Liberal Establishment.”
But was that not true? Gore was defeated in 1970 because he had lost touch with Tennessee. And Lamar’s friend Bill Brook won.
They may have called us all paranoid, but as Henry Kissinger once mordantly observed, “Sometimes, even paranoids have real enemies.”
As for an “enemies list,” the only mistake was writing it down.
Does Lamar not think Nixon had enemies out to destroy him?
Does he not believe there was rejoicing in Washington when Nixon fell, or smug satisfaction when Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were lost—on the faces of those who persuaded themselves that America could not succeed in Vietnam because they had failed?
No one denies Nixon made mistakes. Even he conceded, “I gave them a sword, and they ran it through me.”
But those enemies were not a figment of his or our imagination. The Nixon-haters were real, and they were legion.
In 1969-1970, Nixon had a choice: capitulate or fight.
Compared with what he went through, Obama had a cakewalk.
The Obama administration’s decision to treat FOX News as a political opponent rather than a viable news outlet has angered many conservatives. Not me. FOX News is not and never has been “objective journalism.” But neither is MSNBC, CNN and every other corporate outlet that disseminates politically-biased disinformation. It’s no secret that Obama and FOX have long been “ready to rumble,” so why not finally remove the blinders and the gloves so that FOX can get to their business, unfettered, of beating this administration into a bloody pulp?
Which is exactly what MSNBC, CNN and every other liberal news outlet should have done to the last president. For all the bad press conservatives complained about Bush getting from the liberal media, where in the hell was any hard-nosed journalism leading up to the invasion of Iraq, where more thorough investigation into the administration’s allegations about WMDs and Saddam Hussein’s alleged ties to Osama Bin Laden could have swayed public opinion, maybe preventing a costly and unnecessary war?
When former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan expressed regret in his recent book that the media had been too easy on the administration in the lead up to the Iraq war, CNN correspondent Jessica Yellin explained her colleagues failure, saying that the “press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the President’s high approval ratings.”
Favoring ratings over objective journalism? Who would do such a monstrous thing? Obama senior adviser David Axelrod now says with a straight face, FOX News is “not a news organization” but simply “geared toward making money.” Fellow rocket scientist and White House communications director Anita Dunn says that FOX is just “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” Axelrod and Dunn’s supposed reasons for not allowing FOX News equal White House access also easily applies to every other news outlet Obama gladly indulges.
Our compromised media is nothing new precisely because there is no such thing as objective journalism. Before the 20th century, people got their information from newspapers that were explicitly “Whig” or “Tory” or later, “Republican” or “Democrat” that would engage in nakedly partisan public battles, leaving objectivity to the mind of the reader. Newspapers served the political and corporate interests of those who owned them and everyone knew it.
News outlets still operate this way, the only difference is that Republican news services like FOX and Democrat shills like MSNBC pretend they aren’t biased. FOX News isn’t always “fair” in attacking Obama, nor were they “balanced” with their Bush propaganda. MSNBC laughably continues their charade of objectivity while practically worshipping Obama, even adopting the slogan, “Experience the power of change,” which I do on a regular basis by changing the channel. A year ago I could barely stomach FOX and their Bush worship, finding myself watching MSNBC because they were more inclined to attack the president. Today, MSNBC’s Obama propaganda makes me gag and FOX News is better than ever in its role as one of the new president’s most vicious critics.
There can be no true objective journalism because there are no truly objective human beings, journalists and editors included. Publications take political stances not only in their opinion pages, but in what stories they include or omit, not to mention the slant and tone of those stories. Charleston’s own Post & Courier reflects a moderate, Republican establishment mindset and my conservative readers often wonder why I write for that “liberal rag” the Charleston City Paper, a rather obvious political bias my editor Chris Haire, to his credit, readily admits.
And Americans would be much better informed if all news outlets would openly admit their bias. Liberal Noam Chomsky has argued that the illusion of media objectivity has led to major news outlets becoming the instruments of government and corporate interests rather than society’s watchdog, investigative journalism’s alleged purpose. World-renowned reporter Robert Fisk, who the New York Times once described as “probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain” shares Chomsky’s sentiments: “There is a misconception that journalists can be objective ... What journalism is really about is to monitor power and the centres of power.”
As the Democrats proceed with arguably the most ambitious big government agenda in history, conservatives should hope for a more explicitly partisan FOX News - completely on the outs with the president - that might monitor that “centre of power” that is Obama’s Washington, DC. MSNBC and CNN certainly aren’t going to do it. FOX should do to Obama what MSNBC and CNN should have done to Bush - attempt to cripple the president’s agenda by actually reporting on it. Forget objectivity, how about some actual productivity, in which partisan media outlets might finally do a competent job of keeping an eye on the other party? And far from being offended by the recent White House snub, FOX News should do America a favor by embracing its explicitly partisan role as an enemy of Obama’s state.
I’m glad we had a discussion about “Game” at Taki’s Magazine. As some might know, Taki himself once considered writing a one-man play about his life’s work. But he abandoned the project after he learned that the title “Vagina Monologues” had already been taken.
Nick Griffin appeared on the BBC’s Question Time last night, prompting the inevitable hand wringing about “tolerating the intolerant” and the like across Britain. (Highlights from the evening can be seen here).
A friend of mine who knows lots of grassroots envelop-stuffers and cold-callers for the Labour party reported to me that his friends generally loathe Blair & Brown, their primary motivation for supporting them being the feeling that they’re standing tall against a potential BNP Machtergreifung of England and the European Union or something. Truly, if Nick Griffin didn’t exist, then the UK’s degenerate ruling class might have had to invent him. For the mainstream Left and Right seem to acquire much of their legitimacy from just not being him.
This is not to say that the brunt of the BNP’s platform isn’t perfectly sensible and patriotic. I obviously have no qualms with the party’s central objective of restricting mass immigration and guarding the British people and culture (though its “aboriginal” requirement for party membership is awkward and unnecessary.) I think the party should be criticized mainly for resembling “old Labor” in sticking up for the National Health Service and making noises about major nationalizations and the like. In this line, I find the Ron Paul Revolutionairies (even if many of them are silly libertarians on the immigration issue) to represent something more dangerous to the Establishment in that they talk openly of eliminating whole bureaucracies and institutions, the Fed Money Machine being the most important of all. But of course, antagonism towards the BNP has nothing to do with socialized healthcare and everything to do with Western leaders’ obsession with stamping out even the faintest flickering of national-ethnic-racial identity among white people.
I’ve often wondered why average Americans are so taken with the Brits. It’s almost as if one can recite the most conventional opinion imaginable, but do with a posh accident, and Americans start swooning as a Pavlovian response. We’ve imported a great many tedious prigs due to our weakness for long vowels. Clearly, people who think that England is one big episode of Masterpiece Theater have never travelled to the country. My impression is that England reproduces every American vulgarity—only more so. Thus while normally staid young people from the Midwest turn themselves into out-of-control fools for spring break, a great many Brits of all ages one up them while on “holidays” and act like buffoonish sluts the rest of the year, too. I’ve also read that social engineering and left-wing indoctrination in British schools is, if it’s possible, more intense than what we go through here in the States. I certainly sensed this when I heard the following question asked by an audience member on Question Time:
Being that the the Second World War was fueled by the need to disarm racist and oppressive regimes, is it fair that the BNP has hijacked Churchill as its own?
One would think the PC line on Churchill would be that he was a Victorian Dinosaur: an open imperialist who bragged about mowing down future subjects in battle, an admirer of the Duce, and even the Führer for a time, who was so anti-progress that after the First World War, he pressed for an Allied invasion of Bolshevik territory. What is clear is that Churchill wanted war against Germany because he saw it as a rival, as a nation-state that threatened British power and world supremacy (or what was left of it.) The old bastard couldn’t have cared less about intolerance and racism. (And, of course, in order to disarm the Germans, he aligned Britain with a regime that was more oppressive than the Third Reich.) But it seems that in Cool Britannia an obviously reactionary figure like Churchill can be reconstructed into a force of multiculti tolerance (though, I’m sure, the time will come when Churchill, too, will need to be denounced and discarded as usable national hero.)
The British school system’s obsession with the Nazis reached a point that even the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority started to complain. When I was at grad school, I met a dumb woman who once taught at a British public school and told me that for a summer project, she had her students make evil “Nazi” advertising posters in which the ultimate form of beauty was light skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. It was, of course, drilled into the students how absolutely immoral and disgusting it would be to value these distinctive features of Northern Europeans. Only Nazi bogeymen would do that! Such stories indicate to me that we’ve reached some advanced stage of liberal nihilism in which no one is willing or able to affirm any left-wing value or commitment outside of the utmost necessity of crushing all wicked intolerant Nazis.
At any rate, who could gainsay Nick Griffin when he said that if Churchill were alive today, he’d be on the side of the BNP? For, among reasons, “no other party would have him,
for what he said in the early days of mass immigration into this country, for the fact that “they’re only coming for our benefit system,” and for the fact that in his younger days he was extremely critical of the dangers of fundamentalist Islam, in a way that would now be described as Islamophobic.
Joe Biden is truly Dick Cheney’s worthy successor- between them, there’s no substantive difference on foreign policy. In Bucharest, the Vice President exhorted regional allies to help their struggling brethren in Eurasia achieve the shining dream- the only legitimate dream a nation is permitted- of “flourishing” democracy.
“You can help guide Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine along the path to stability and prosperity,” he said, adding there was also “much work to be done in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Belarus.”
As Biden made clear, the US is not abandoning its plans for dominating the post-Soviet space. Rather, there will be a shift in emphasis, as Washington expects its East European allies to do more heavy lifting in the realm of covert action and political operations on Russia’s periphery.
Romania’s likely support of post-election demonstrations in Moldova earlier this year provides an example of what the White House has in mind. Moldova’s corrupt Communist government in Kishinev was besieged by protestors demanding union with Romania. The unrest was well-coordinated through Twitter (an episode that would later be repeated in Iran, with overt backing from State). It is already well known that Western “civil society” NGOs train their local assets in the exploitation of information technologies with regime change as the end goal.
With the context of Romanian activity in Moldova, Biden’s speech highlighted the administration’s expectations for the East Europeans. Countries like Romania and Poland will act as the launch pad for efforts to undermine Moscow’s zone of interests.
“You delivered on the promise of your revolution. You are now in a position to help others do the same.”
Nations such as Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, congratulated by the Vice President for their embrace of modern Western norms, typically gravitate into the orbit of the current hegemon on the continent. The experience of the twentieth century is helpful- before these countries joined NATO, they had been part of the Warsaw Pact. Prior to the Cold War, their armies were fighting with the Axis. Washington’s immediate geopolitical agenda concerns gaining control of energy transit routes from the Caspian that would feed into Europe, and its local allies are tasked with their specific roles in the project.
Beyond all these maneuvers for advantage in the Great Game is their ultimate source- the ideological driver of liberal internationalism. The US remains a revolutionary power devoted to remaking the world in its own image; like the content of countless other speeches, Biden’s words reflect this desire.
I’m glad Kevin used my interview to remark a little on the conceptual tension experienced by young right-wingers.
There are a variety of ways to approach the problem and each yields part of the answer. A traditionalist likely would object to Game the same way he’d object to capitalism—as naked calculation and will to power lacking any moral anchor, and that cannot function as an ultimate standard. The young radical might respond severally:
• It’s a situational problem. Insistence on obeying some sort of strictly Christian morality is a nostalgia-based anachronism. You have to deal with things based on what they are, and since the social setting at present is pervasively anarchic the individual needs the sharpest tools to get by. At the very least it makes sense to talk about that approach.
• As my interviewee pointed out, he and his tribe view Game as a tool and not as an overriding philosophy.
• And of course there’s the long-range right-wing anti-Christian response. Why take everything in the rubric of “traditional Christianity” at face value? At some level Christianity is an imposition on a more original traditional morality and needs to be viewed skeptically, since it, like more full-blown forms of egalitarianism, decorates our real natures with pretty lies.
Whatever the validity of those retorts, the traditionalist is going to look absurd if he strikes an urgent condemnatory posture. What is he doing getting this upset about Game? It’s a piece of jargon to describe an approach that responds to a man’s social condition. Something as goofy and specific as Game didn’t establish that condition—other things did. Traditionalist forces can’t gain real leverage over our social setting, so who can be blamed for attempting to navigate that setting somewhat on its own terms?
There’s something in the traditionalist critique for me, to be sure, but it very much depends on how it’s framed and applied. It loses all of its force when it’s thrown, with the full weight of a Joseph de Maistre, against everything that doesn’t sit right with the fuddy-duddy.
Kevin notes TakiMag’s “vague temperament,” and he’s right—no one here is an unqualified anything, be it a traditionalist Catholic or individualist Nietzschean or racial Darwinian. We can relax since we don’t have to worry about any one editorial line dominating the others and oversimplifying our thought and its outlet.
The Obama administration is foolish to believe that only FOX News is guilty of what White House communications director Anita Dunn calls “opinion journalism masquerading as news.”
Steve Sailer has a trenchant critique of the latest nonsense from the biggest peddler of conventional “wisdom” at the New York Times, Tom Friedman, who has long argued that education can prevent Americans from being harmed by globalization. Except Friedman now tells us that education alone is not enough, since even well-educated Americans are being harmed economically by globalization. In addition to traditonal academic skills, all of us also need to learn how to sell ourselves, to be “rainmakers” in law firm parlance. Sailer’s entire takedown of Friedman is well worth reading, but here is the heart of Sailer’s critique:
Okay, so our schools have to not only teach the times tables, they have to teach salesmanship and entrepreneurship. Hmmhmm, my impression from watching The Wire was that our public schools were already turning out more than enough crack salesmen but not enough kids who were good at arithmetic.
You know, this is almost enough to make you wonder if globalization isn’t all that Tom Friedman has cracked it up to be.
I kind of have the impression that quite a few Americans, like, maybe, two or three hundred million of them, don’t possess either the IQs or the personalities to be rainmakers. Are they permanently obsolete in the world that Friedman has been such an energetic cheerleader for?
As conservatives, or at least people on the Right, we obviously venerate tradition and conventional morality. However, particularly for those of us under 30 who have never known anything other than this remarkably stupid leftist world we inherited, we have no idea what a traditional conservative society even looks like. It is impossible for us to be reactionary, even if we wanted to be—we would just be making something up. It is one thing to fight in defense of certain institutions and moral codes having lived underneath them—it is another thing to rebuild them entirely once they have been completely destroyed and you have no firsthand knowledge of how they operate. I don’t think such an effort can win. I would love to be proven wrong.
The vague temperament that is emerging at Takimag and certain schools in Europe which Richard calls the Alternative Right values tradition but cannot appeal to it for legitimacy. The legitimacy was stripped long ago by the attack from the left and by the corruption and cowardice of traditional sources of authority. Therefore, almost out of necessity, the Alternative Right gets inspiration from new sources. One is leftist writers whose writings on power, deconstruction, and cultural hegemony can easily be turned against the left wing establishment that rules “our” civilization. Another is right wing writers who come from outside establishment conservative traditions in both Europe and America and who could serve as the beginnings of a new tradition. And finally, biology, sociobiology, and sociology are important influences and I would argue the last is the most important when it comes to Game.
I think this is why many young right wingers are intellectually fascinated with the idea of Game. It derives from a viewpoint that is certainly not “conservative” but is mortally dangerous to left wing concepts about sexuality, egalitarianism, feminism, and gender roles. In fact, it completely destroys them.
At the same time, traditionalists and conservatives can quite compellingly argue that it is an ethical and practical dead end, a surrender to social decay, a way to exploit and even profit from the collapse of moral standards. Lawrence Auster at the invaluable View from the Right took on Game in August in a discussion well worth reading for anyone interested in this.
Even though the topic is somewhat, well, silly, I think the core question raised by this is important. In the absence of any accepted or legitimate authorities or institutions that conservatives can rally around, how are we supposed to operate as non-liberals in a fundamentally liberal world?
Why are women in bars? I mean, I know why they’re allowed in bars. It’s the law, but why do they bother? Isn’t it like Gay Marriage? You want the right to do it but you don’t actually want to literally do it. Bars are about poisoning your body and arguing about politics, which, when you get right down to it, is arguing about numbers. Women aren’t predisposed to either of those things. So why do they do it?
They do it because it’s empowering to be a man. So, they sugar coat the booze, add some food coloring and dive into the numbers fight. I was at a pub the other night and that girl who always talks about being raped showed up. I think her name is Megan Iwasraped. Within about ten minutes of meeting her, she made it clear to the table she had been raped by blurting out, “I was raped.” This instantly had the desired effect and made us treat her with kid gloves because of the oppressive oppression that permeates every aspect of her life. It was like she took a pill and instantly became black.
A little bit later, one of the guys I was with leaned over and whispered something into her ear. Then they made out. Then they faced the table smiling and holding hands. It was one of the strangest social gestures I have ever witnessed. After enjoying the sympathy rape victims get and then being treated like an attractive sexual being for a change, she was feeling empowered enough to play with the big boys. I had been saying there was no way anyone could call themselves a feminist today and not be constantly bitching about Islam. I criticized Jezebel for their lack of Neda coverage and she showed me some posts she had done on that very subject by pulling them up on her iPhone. Touché. Maybe this is one of the few women who DOES belong in bars, I thought, the exception that makes the rule.
Unfortunately, the conversation left the cold, hard, facts and drifted back into arbitrarily defending the Middle East. We even got into that cliché of comparing high heel shoes to burqas. Oy vey. Sexism in the West does not exist when put next to sexism in the East. When my wife and her friends have a girl’s night out they’re all wearing stilettos so high the air is thin and the LAST thing they want to do is run into some dudes. In fact, they usually book a karaoke room just so they can be alone. Women wear high heels because they feel like it, and nobody’s going to give them 15 lashes if they don’t. This is not the case in Hofuf. Today’s Islam is all about the repression of women no matter where they live. Muslims are throwing butyric acid in women’s faces in London right now for not marrying the right guy. Two thirds of all murders in the West Bank are honor killings. Yemen, Lebanon, Egypt… they all have dozens of honor killings a year. It’s all about the Global Village when it comes to recycling your coffee cup but when Human Rights rears its ugly head, you shy away and pretend it’s none of our business.
See? This is what bars are about. Using numbers to argue political points. It’s like Dungeons and Dragons and I totally understand why half the population finds it boring. Men use their little number figurines to battle it out and if they lose, well, that works, too. That’s how we learn. Since when do women want to play a mathy version of Risk? The president of Harvard lost his job for saying numbers is a male game but behind closed doors, every female I know happily admits stats, figures, and all that jive, bores the shit out of them.
Anyway, during our “debate” the Middle East kept getting high fives and I was starting to hear talk of the burqa being empowering. “So why is it made out of black polyester,” I asked. Why not some flowing white cotton? “It’s not made out of polyester” she retorted before adding, “Polyester is an oil based product. They export oil.” Huh? Is that why toothpicks are verboten at the lumber yard? “Get that out of your mouth Harv! We need to export that! We only use plastic toothpicks here!” Megan realized she wasn’t making sense so she pulled out the Jezebel race card: “What about rape?” she asked. As Heart’s “What About Love” played in my head with new lyrics, I smiled and said, “Honey, America ain’t got nuthin’ on the Middle East when it comes to rape.” She then said, “Did you just call me honey?” and stormed out of the bar. Thank God.
I don’t get the modern New York feminist. Why do they want to be men? What’s so disgusting about being a woman? They are so determined not to fall into the parent trap or the kitchen jail they have single sex in the city until their ovaries dry up and they feel like worthless, lonely, pieces of shit (“No I’m not. I’m a cougar! Cougar power. Right ladies? Right? Um… hello?”) I remember a comment on Jezebel that said, “I resent mcguinness saying it’s ‘natural’ for women to have children.” How’s that for the pendulum snapping off its hinges and flying into the toilet? Today’s feminists actually resent what it is to be a woman. They resent the ability to give life. Ooooooh kaaaaaaye.
The irony is, by discrediting all it is to be a female and trying desperately to prove they are just as male as most men, they become the textbook definition of a misogynist. No ladies, you’re not as good at fractions as us and you can’t bench press as much as us. So fucking what. YOU’RE MAGIC. Living beings that populate the world come out of your body. You’re a magic alien with super powers that we all need to exist. Now you want to beat me at checkers, too? It’s like me sitting at a bar and telling Superman, “I know way more about punk seven inches than you AND I am way better at making pant jokes than you. Therefore, I’m better.” Then he says, “Oh yeah?” And goes flying out the top of the bar knocking ten foot holes in every floor he goes through. Then he flies to Mars and gets some huge rock nobody’s ever heard of. Then he brings it back and puts it on the bar and says, “Nigga, you’re not even in the same league as me.” To which I would respond, “Oh.”
However, women are taught never to discuss their superpowers. In fact, they are vilified for succumbing to them. Feminists worked hard to prove women are more than baby machines and to make babies is to trivialize that work. Look bitch, if you are one of the 5% that doesn’t want to enjoy the miracle of birth, you should have every right to do just that, but don’t drag the rest of the natural world down with you. Women earn less than men because they choose to
Why do I give a shit? Well, in a Catch-22 to beat the band, I consider myself far more feminist than this blogger or anyone at the website she works for. I want what’s best for women and rejecting their natural state is making them miserable. That’s right. The Bastardization of Instinct that is modern feminism has been making women unhappier every day since its inception. Their bodies tell them to breed so they do, but then there’s this strange inclination to “do it all” and be a man, too. This leaves them running two lives which is a pain in the ass. The ones who don’t breed are even more miserable. Way to go sisters. You wrecked yourself. Now leave us to our rotten barley and oats. We have some number fighting to do.
I had been dimly aware of Roissy for some time, merely as a hip blogger that a lot of young guys with right-wing attitudes read. I never followed up with any actual reading of my own, though, so I hadn’t absorbed his general message or the outlook behind it when I encountered a post of his entitled “The Power Of Game: From Hello To Kiss In Ten Minutes.”
Game? I’d never heard of the thing, and here was a widely-read fellow confidently trotting it out as a basic tool of social approach and organization.
What’s behind this? What is “Game,” and what’s its relevance and power? Is it something in itself that’s worthwhile discussing on its own terms, or do all paths through Game lead to empty jargon and “pick up artists” with felt hats, fake tans, and gimmicky jewelry? I caught up with Welmer, the pseudonymous force behind a new relevant web outlet, to talk through some of these questions.
You’ve just started a web outlet, The Spearhead, which is open about its emphasis on “Game,” or however you’d style a self-interested male perspective on social dynamics. How did you get into Game?
I found Game by accident, but it had a great deal of relevance to me when I did, because I was in the middle of a breakup. The frank, open discussions of female sexuality really hit home at a time when I had to deal with them personally. A lot of guys live a lie—a life of willful ignorance if you will—and I was forced to stare the facts right in the face. Most men really don’t understand that sexuality drives women at least as much as it does men. For men, sex is an on-off thing. For women, it’s always there, mixed up with everything else.
Game was one of the tools I used to break out of the culturally imposed limits on male understanding of female sexuality. It wasn’t about picking up random girls in bars, but rather arming myself with some knowledge that could keep me from repeatedly butting my head against hard reality. America, oddly enough, picked up a great deal of Victorian sensibility, and that infects our perspective and behavior even today. I guess we needed something to latch onto during our identity crisis following the Revolution, and then the Civil War. Maybe it’s Dickens’ fault. Actually, I’m sure some of it is his fault—the guy was absolutely batty over the innocent virginal young woman fantasy. Game helps you break out of that mentality, which is such a massive hoax that I can hardly believe it held up for so long.
As for The Spearhead, we are all pretty much in agreement that Game is a tool rather than a philosophy of life. Most of us support it, but we have our own ideas about how it should be put to use. TS, if I may speak for our authors, is about letting men know that they have choices; that they are in fact free to follow their own hearts, provided they employ some common sense and take reality into account. If I can sum our philosophy up in a few words, it is about “Can and Cannot rather than Should and Should Not.” The other mission is to give guys a place where they can express their own opinions in safety to quite a few people—to give them a voice over the crowd.
At some level Game just a current name for an old thing, namely, male social mastery. At another level—notice the lingo and the attention to evolutionary psychology—it’s a recent and unique creation, an activity of a particular organized group and set of personalities (like Mystery, Ross Jeffries, and PUAs in general). Why do you think male social mastery is in such an eroded state? Why is the pursuit making such a comeback? Where do you think it’s headed?
Game is an ancient concept. One Christian blogger wrote a parody of Game suggesting that Jesus was the true master of Game (psychological, not sexual), and he actually made some very astute points. The evolutionary psychology, I think, is simply a new way of looking at concepts that people have been aware of for a very long time. Carl Jung, writing about the state of gender relations in America in 1911, brought up an incident in ancient Athens in which there was a trend of suicides by young women. The Areopagus announced that it would publicly display the nude corpse of the next girl who did so, and the suicides stopped immediately. According to Jung, this proved that the Athenian judges understood sex psychology. He then said that American men do not understand it as well as the ancient Athenians, and that there was likely to eventually be a national tragedy due to wrong-headed American attitudes toward female sexuality. Prophetic, I think.
What sets the new emphasis on Game apart is that it emerged after the sexual revolution and government mandated equality between men and women. Many of the guys who are now studying and expounding upon Game would have found a wife and settled down to some other interest if it weren’t for female promiscuity on the one hand and the prevalence of female-initiated divorce on the other. It is essentially a cultural response to both an opportunity and a threat: there is both a carrot (easy sex) and a stick (ruin through divorce) driving men to Game.
I am convinced that the technical lingo and forays into psychology are more a result of a different type of man taking up the role of rogue than would traditionally have been the case. There have always been hit and run types out there, but the majority of them have been what the PUAs like to call “naturals”—that is, they were pretty much born to be rakes, and usually not the type who take a systematic, programmer type approach to picking up women (or much else for that matter). But now, given social realities, there are a lot of studious types who are assiduously studying Game to give themselves a better shot with the increasingly promiscuous women who surround them. Their other choice, as many, many men complain, is involuntary celibacy or marriage to a woman who has slept with numerous men and is quite likely to divorce them on a whim, effectively ruining their lives for years.
Does Game lack an organized media outlet, as opposed to blogs and discussion boards? Does it need one?
I don’t think “Game” needs an organized media outlet, but a lot of the issues surrounding its emergence need to be discussed out in the open. Maybe Game needs to be introduced into fiction a little more, but we already had Hitch, and it would be kind of limited as a theme. However, some of the guys who write about it—Roissy in particular—are pretty talented writers and ought to have a wider voice, if only because they provide entertaining, high-quality content.
As I see it most Game material will always have a bit of a trade publication feel to it. Only a few of the luminaries will ever break into more mainstream media or entertainment, and it will be because of native talent rather than focus on Game. At best, Game could support a couple guys running a blog under the umbrella of a blog consortium along the lines of Gawker, and a few more traveling salesmen types running Game seminars and “boot camps.”
You seem to think that the issues and concerns attended to in the PUA community aren’t self-contained—they relate to bigger issues and concerns, such as civilizational health. How do the two go together?
Lately, I’ve been seeing a dichotomy between “civilization” on the one hand, and “society” on the other. What we’ve been seeing is the steady strengthening of society at the expense of civilization, which was originally designed to contain and manage society. As I see it, society has always existed, and exists even in a troop of baboons, but civilization is dependent on certain constraints and laws. Generally, we find laws and philosophies that are pretty common throughout different civilizations. The Ten Commandments is an example, the Analects, Laws of Manu, etc. These concepts were based on years of careful experimentation and observation of the behavior of society. For the last half century or so we’ve been striking down the pillars of civilization to suit the whims and hungers of society, and so the health of civilization is not very robust in the West today. Savages and barbarians can be wealthy, and they can have a great society and impressive technology (e.g. Vikings, Mongols, Bantus), and I think we are living in that kind of world, but I don’t think you can really call what we have a shining civilization.
Game is a direct result of the diminishment of civilization. It is a tool men have rediscovered that gives them a chance in the mating game now that the old rules have been done away with. That’s really how it relates to civilization: it is there only because it is needed. In the old days, when you went into Indian country, you’d carry a rifle because it was lawless and uncivilized out there. That’s how the mating game is today—a wilderness full of howling savages who might scalp you. Game is your trusty rifle.
How have you chosen contributors?
I didn’t so much choose as I appealed. I came up with the idea for a consolidated blog after seeing a number of fairly popular blogs and a fairly widespread community of commenters engaged in discussion of issues revolving around a central theme. Some bloggers, like Ferdinand Bardamu (very smart young guy), describe it as the “Roissysphere,” but I think a lot of this coalesced naturally, by accretion, because the strange state of gender relations and the family is impossible to ignore these days.
What I initially looked for was people who had their own blogs, and suggested on my personal blog that I would host and run a blog for a number of writers that would have a bigger impact than any one of us could make individually. I asked for help in naming it, and eventually came up with The Spearhead after a number of guys suggested a classical theme.
Soon, I had a number of enthusiastic volunteers, and after dealing with the technical issues we went live just a few weeks ago. I’m still getting more offers to contribute, and I’d be happy to take on at least a couple more at this point. I think it’s very important that the regular guy has a say here. My contributors come from all walks of life, including such various occupations as pilot, computer programmer, craftsman and attorney. We aren’t going to be as polished as a professional magazine, but we are volunteers here, and I think our ideas and opinions are probably closer to the American reality than your typical journalist or writer for the New Yorker.
... are also incommensurate with those of decades past because what in the ‘60s was a 12-game season is now a 16-game season. If all of the season marks have been set in the past 20 years, then, who can be surprised? Even if the rules hadn’t all been changed to facilitate scoring, this would be completely unsurprising. It certainly doesn’t prove that Favre, Manning, Roethlisberger, and Brady are all better than Stabler, Staubach, Bradshaw, and Tarkenton.
Regarding the facemask question, a reader writes:
You made a really good point about facemasks. I played rugby in college and law school. Because we don’t wear pads and helmets, we don’t fly through the air at each other like human spears. Nobody want to hurt himself in the process of delivering a massive hit.
That said, rugby is boring to watch and football rules. Long live facemasks!
Media Matters has been unloading on James O’Keefe with both barrels since his bombshell expose of ACORN. Now James has completely nailed them in a total lie by the Philadelphia branch of ACORN. Grab some popcorn and let’s wait for what Media Matters can possibly say in response.
For some reason, O’Keefe as a pimp never stops being funny. Hat tip and major credit to Andrew Breitbart and Big Government for hosting all this.
Everybody complains about how dumbed-down movies have gotten. Here, for example, are representative quotes from A.O. Scott of the New York Times in “Spoon-Fed Cinema” bemoaning the state of movies c. 2009: “infantile,” “male immaturity,” and “a program of mass infantilization.”
Yet, nobody ever seems to mention one obvious change in audience composition over the decades that has contributed to the present blockbusteritis. And only one renegade filmmaker has used this change in demographics to be able to afford to make innovative movies; but nobody wants to talk about him, either.
My favorite movie theatre these days is the The Mann Plant 16 in Van Nuys, California. (Why the odd sounding name “The Plant?” It’s built on the site of an old General Motors factory, making it a perfect symbol of the progression of the American economy from manufacturing automobiles to consuming entertainment.) At $10.75 per ticket, it’s a couple of bucks cheaper than the high-end Arclight Cinema four miles south in Sherman Oaks, yet The Plant has comparably lavish legroom and sound quality.
Best of all, movies that I want to write about are seldom sold out at The Plant. If in August, say, Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds was sold out through the 11:40 pm show at the Arclight, the 7:30 pm showing at The Plant would be two-thirds empty. Why? Because people in Van Nuys don’t go to movies that anybody writes about.
Van Nuys is America’s future. This is not to say that The Plant is struggling financially. Oh, no. My wife always insists on buying Plant tickets online rather than miss the start of the movie because we’re stuck in the long box-office line for whatever the locals are clamoring for this week. (Beverly Hills Chihuahua II perhaps?)
A century old, going to the movies is a technological relic, but it remains a surprisingly stable industry, with ticket sales declining only minutely from year to year.
Women once made up the heart of the movie-going audience (my mother went to the show most nights in 1940 in St. Paul). Then, crime drove women off the streets after 1965, leaving younger males as the prime ticket buyers. The realization that they could make lots of money off young Baby Boom males’ tastes liberated slightly older male filmmakers in the 1970s (the decade that almost all current critics idolize).
Since then, change has been slow in the movie business. Perhaps the biggest audience trend in recent decades has gotten the least attention because it merely strengthened forces pushing toward mainstream mediocrity: Hispanics have emerged as the most reliable domestic fans of Hollywood blockbusters.
A study by the Motion Picture Association of America found that the Hispanic share of admissions grew from 16 percent in 2003 to 20 percent in 2007, versus about 15 percent of the population. According to a 2009 report by the Nielsen Company, Hispanic moviegoers average 11.5 new releases seen in theatres over the last 12 months, versus 7.0 for non-Hispanic whites.
Most importantly, Latinos make up 28 percent of “heavy moviegoers.” They comprise 30 percent of the fanatics who see ten or more summer movies in the theatres. And they want to see them now: “Half of all Hispanics prefer to see a movie within the first 10 days of a film’s opening.”
And, according to another Nielsen report, Hispanics are the least likely of any ethnicity to complain that movie tickets are too expensive. (Whites are the most likely to kvetch.) They are also most enthusiastic about 3-D versions of movies. Plus, they buy a disproportionate number of DVDs.
Latinos just really like big American movies.
Imagine you are a studio executive weighing whether or not to greenlight for the summer of 2012 a $200 million action thriller based on, say, the old Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots
Which one will it be?
For you, 12 to 24-year-old Hispanic males are the quintessence of the modern movie market. If they don’t show up for your opening weekend, your movie lays an expensive egg. Which one do you think will they show up for: Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots or A Confederacy of Dunces?
Now, you might wonder if young Latinos care about a toy that was a sensation in America in 1966, probably before their ancestors even arrived. But, the track record suggests that they’ll gladly line up to see whatever crud American Baby Boomers liked 25 or 50 years ago (as long as you give it a hip-hop edge). For example, the 2007 hit Alvin and the Chipmunks, based on Ross Bagdasarian’s 1958 novelty record, did exceptionally well among Hispanics.
Back in 2001, about 24 percent of the audience for the streetracing movie The Fast and the Furious
was Latino. Their share rose to 38 percent of admissions for 2 Fast 2 Furious. Last April, the third sequel, the imaginatively titled Fast and Furious, enjoyed a $71-million opening weekend, with Latinos making up 46 percent of those who paid money to see Vin Diesel recreate his career-making role.
A reader pointed out:
Don’t know if you watched the latest Fast and Furious movie, but the scenes at the border are worth it for me. The movie makes sneaking across the border look nearly impossible. You need modified super fast cars, the best drivers, and computer and satellite assistance. That and a series of huge tunnels that wind for miles beneath the US/Mexican desert. If it really is that difficult, we should see coming across only genius-level Olympic-quality athletes, sort of like Mexican Dolph Lundgrens, and no one else.
Variety reports that particular favorites with the Hispanic audience include The Mummy series, Transformers, the Jackie Chan-Jet Li fantasy actioner The Forbidden Kingdom, The Incredible Hulk, and, yes, Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
Josh Levin worried in Slate that Beverly Hills Chihuahua was full of unfortunate “stereotypes” about Mexicans, but Mexican-Americans love Mexican stereotypes, as ten minutes of watching Univision would demonstrate. On Sabado Gigante, you put a fat guy with a drooping mustache in a sombrero and the skit practically writes itself.
If you are worried about whether Mexicans will assimilate into American culture, well, the box office results suggest that they will happily assimilate into lowest-common-denominator American pop culture. Variety notes (in its traditional telegraphese):
While distribs have tried to woo Latino auds with Spanish-language fare, the results have been unimpressive.
So far, the main exception has been that the Weinsteins earned $12 million at the box office with Under the Same Moon, a melodrama about a little Mexican boy who sneaks across the border to rejoin his mom, a maid in LA. The studio tried to market it to both the art house and immigrant audiences. It was too cheesy for the Arclight, where I saw it in an empty theatre after having been turned away (for once) at a sold-out Plant.
Otherwise, there are remarkably few Spanish-language films that play even in Los Angeles (excepting Pedro Almodóvar-style art films for non-Hispanics). I see more ads for Persian-language films from Iran.
Variety continues:
But they’ve found amazing success not by offering material geared to Hispanic auds, but by catering their marketing of “mainstream” films to them.
The comparison with black films is interesting:
“With an African-American movie, you can have a hit just with African-American audiences, but so far, the answer has been no with Hispanics. They have more interest in assimilating,” Universal prexy of marketing and distribution Adam Fogelson says.
One factor is the talent gap between African-Americans and Mexican-Americans.
There are three prestigious Mexican directors working in Hollywood: Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Guillermo del Toro. Still, their names are probably better known to upscale art house audiences than to Mexican-Americans. The “Three Amigos” are from the classes in Mexico who very seldom emigrate to America.
Actual Mexican-Americans are rare in Hollywood’s upper creative ranks, despite several million living within commuting distance of the movie studios. (Robert Rodriguez of Spy Kids and Sin City fame, one of ten children from a San Antonio family, is the most striking exception to this tendency.)
In summary, the message Hollywood is hearing from the burgeoning Hispanic audience is: “Give us more of the same, only more so.”
Fortunately, one filmmaker has imaginatively seen the growing Hispanic audience as liberating his ability to make money from deeply personal and deeply weird movies: Mel Gibson.
Twelve days into the remarkable run of his Aramaic-language The Passion of the Christ, with its Counter-Reformation Carravagioesque aesthetic that proved galvanizing for Latinos, a telephone poll found:
Hispanics are most likely to have already seen the movie (67%) compared to the other races by significant margins. … Hispanics are also more than twice as likely as Asians (33%) to have already seen it, and two and a half times as likely as Whites (26%).
Since no Hollywood studio would work with Gibson on The Passion, he pocketed the huge profits, allowing him to make Apocalypto, with an all-Amerindian cast speaking Mayan. It wasn’t the huge hit The Passion was, but it made over $50 million at the U.S. box office. That was rather good for (allow me to say it again) a mainstream movie with an all-Amerindian cast speaking Mayan. Nobody in Hollywood talks to Gibson, though, so the Hispanic influx is seen not as an inspiration for something new, but as a rationalization for, say, Battling Tops: The Movie.
Republican out-reach reaches a new low…
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| You’ve Got Fail | ||||
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[ht: Richard Hoste]
The U.S. has every characteristic of a failed state.
The U.S. government’s current operating budget is dependent on foreign financing and money creation.
Too politically weak to be able to advance its interests through diplomacy, the U.S. relies on terrorism and military aggression.
Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interest of rich organized interest groups at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. For example, war at all cost—which enriches the armaments industry, the officer corps and the financial firms that handle the war’s financing—takes precedence over the needs of American citizens. There is no money to provide the uninsured with health care, but Pentagon officials have told the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in the House that every gallon of gasoline delivered to U.S. troops in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers $400.
“It is a number that we were not aware of, and it is worrisome,” said Rep. John Murtha, chairman of the subcommittee.
According to reports, the U.S. Marines in Afghanistan use 800,000 gallons of gasoline per day. At $400 per gallon, that comes to a $320,000,000 daily fuel bill for the Marines alone. Only a country totally out of control would squander resources in this way.
While the U.S. government squanders $400 per gallon of gasoline in order to kill women and children in Afghanistan, many millions of Americans have lost their jobs and their homes and are experiencing the kind of misery that is the daily life of poor Third World peoples. Americans are living in their cars and in public parks. America’s cities, towns and states are suffering from the costs of economic dislocations and the reduction in tax revenues from the economy’s decline. Yet, Obama has sent more troops to Afghanistan, a country halfway around the world that is not a threat to America.
It costs $750,000 per year for each soldier we have in Afghanistan. The soldiers, who are at risk of life and limb, are paid a pittance, but all of the privatized services to the military are rolling in excess profits. One of the great frauds perpetuated on the American people was the privatization of services that the U.S. military traditionally performed for itself. “Our” elected leaders could not resist any opportunity to create at taxpayers’ expense private wealth that could be recycled to politicians in campaign contributions.
Republicans and Democrats on the take from the private insurance companies maintain that the U.S. cannot afford to provide Americans with health care and that cuts must be made even in Social Security and Medicare. So how can the U.S. afford bankrupting wars, much less totally pointless wars that serve no American interest?
The enormous scale of foreign borrowing and money creation necessary to finance Washington’s wars are sending the dollar to historic lows. The dollar has even experienced large declines relative to currencies of Third World countries such as Botswana and Brazil. The decline in the dollar’s value reduces the purchasing power of Americans’ already declining incomes.
Despite the lowest level of housing starts in 64 years, the U.S. housing market is flooded with unsold homes, and financial institutions have a huge and rising inventory of foreclosed homes not yet on the market.
Industrial production has collapsed to the level of 1999, wiping out a decade of growth in industrial output.
The enormous bank reserves created by the Federal Reserve are not finding their way into the economy. Instead, the banks are hoarding the reserves as insurance against the fraudulent derivatives that they purchased from the gangster Wall Street investment banks.
The regulatory agencies have been corrupted by private interests. “Frontline” reports that Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers blocked Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, from regulating derivatives. President Obama rewarded Larry Summers for his idiocy by appointing him director of the National Economic Council. What this means is that profits for Wall Street will continue to be leeched from the diminishing blood supply of the American economy.
An unmistakable sign of Third World despotism is a police force that sees the pubic as the enemy. Thanks to the federal government, our local police forces are now militarized and imbued with hostile attitudes toward the public. SWAT teams have proliferated, and even small towns now have police forces with the firepower of U.S. Special Forces.
Summons are increasingly delivered by SWAT teams that tyrannize citizens with broken down doors, a $400 or $500 repair born by the tyrannized resident. Recently, a mayor and his family were the recipients of incompetence by the town’s local SWAT team, which mistakenly wrecked the mayor’s home, terrorized his family and killed the family’s two friendly Labrador dogs.
If a town’s mayor can be treated in this way, what do you think is the fate of the poor white or black? Or the idealistic student who protests his government’s inhumanity?
In any failed state, the greatest threat to the population comes from the government and the police. That is certainly the situation today in the U.S.A. Americans have no greater enemy than their own government. Washington is controlled by interest groups that enrich themselves at the expense of the American people.
The 1 percent that comprise the superrich are laughing as they say, “Let them eat cake.”
Like Kevin Gutzman, I, too, grew up playing football in Texas, though, granted, I attended a small, elite private school—replete with dorky uniforms and compulsory Episcopalian chapel—so my experience wasn’t exactly made of the same stuff as Friday Night Lights
Anyway, I have many fond memories of busing out to places like Pilot Point, TX, where the football stadium would emerge off in the distance like a great cathedral at the center of quaint Texan village. These memories are fond now, at any rate; at the time, I was shaking in my pads in the face of those tough-as-nails Pilot Pointers, all whom wanted to teach the prep boys from Dallas a hard lesson. If you want a picture of what’s its like for a “Marksman,” as we were called, to play real Texas High School Football, just imagine a cleat stamping on a human face—forever.
But that’s all history. While Kevin makes the case that football has become less difficult and more wussy over the years, through various rule changes and the like, the rest of the country is expressing its concern that pigskin is too barbaric and dangerous. Just this week, America’s favorite public intellectual, Malcolm Gladwell, argued in the New Yorker that football might be morally equivalent to dogfighting due to all the concussions, and even brain damage, that result from those viscous crask-back blocks. Gladwell suggested such injuries aren’t “incidental” to the game but “inherent” in it:
Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport. It’s a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so.
Just so I might one day command six-figure corporate speaking fees, as does Herr Doktor Gladwell, let me offer this modest proposal for making the game of football both tougher and less head-injury prone.
Remove the facemask.
In order to make football safer, everyone wants to make the helmets more elaborate and sophisticated, with perhaps rear airbags being the logical culmination of the trend. But let’s not forget, a free-safety is willing to launch himself horizontal to the ground in order to deliver a thunderous blow to a wide receiver who dared go out over the middle only because he knows that his head—or, more likely, his visage and grin—will be reasonably well protected by his polycarbonate alloy plastic helmet and vinyl-coated steel-alloy facemask. The unintended consequences of better helmets are more head-first hits. Remove the facemask, and overnight good, solid form tackling will be back in style. Here’s a preview of what we could look forward to:
When a runaway hot-air balloon reported to be carrying a six-year-old boy made headlines last week, many were surprised to find out it had all been a hoax. Admitted the six-year-old boy on live television, “We did this for a show.”
Another hot-air balloon by the name of Lindsey Graham also made headlines last week by putting on a show of his own, as the South Carolina Senator held court at a town hall meeting, touting his conservative credentials before an angry crowd that wasn’t buying it. “They’re a political fringe group” Graham said of his critics, “I’m the conservative in the room.”
Is Graham a “conservative?” Are his detractors merely a political fringe? In a headline reading “Graham aims to tackle ‘radical’ views,” the Greenville News reports:
Political experts say a burgeoning group of right-wing activists long seen as the fringe of the party is growing in influence, fueled by economic fears and populist ire over Washington spending and magnified by the power of the Internet… Whether they represent a vocal minority or the seeds of a serious election challenge for Graham remains to be seen, though at least one Republican consultant believes the state’s senior senator has ‘real problems’ outside of just a raucous town hall meeting… ‘If he were running right now, he’d be in serious trouble,’ said Dave Woodard, a Clemson University political science professor and former campaign manager for Graham who said he has Upstate polling to support his view.
Woodard’s findings coincide with another story published in the Wall Street Journal the same day entitled “Tea-Party Activists Complicate Republican Comeback Strategy” in which the author Naftali Bendavid notes:
The rise of conservative ‘tea party’ activists around the country has created a dilemma for Republicans. They are breathing life into the party’s quest to regain power. But they’re also waging war on some candidates hand-picked by GOP leaders as the most likely to win… the tea-party movement appears aggressively nonpartisan, much like Ross Perot’s supporters in 1992. ‘The tea-party movement, in my judgment, has proven to be very real, but it’s precisely the fact that it’s real that makes it difficult to take advantage of,’ says Vin Weber, a former Minnesota congressman and now a top Republican strategist. ‘They don’t want to be co-opted by the Republican Party.
For his entire career, Graham’s strategy for victory has been the same as his party’s—dangle conservative-sounding rhetoric before easily duped constituents during an election year so that Republicans can be returned to Washington to do as much damage as the Democrats. It’s refreshing to learn that according to some experts, a growing number of grassroots conservatives are tired of being duped.
Not that establishment Republicans won’t stop trying. Graham is a master of this long-standing Republican hoax, in which politicians will float their own hot-button, hot-air balloons, especially concerning social issues like gay marriage, abortion, and the 2nd amendment, but are actually far more concerned with the much more important business of spending trillions of dollars on needless “bailouts” and stimulus packages, even more needless trillions on unnecessary wars, collaborating with the Democrats to expand the domestic welfare state and appointing liberal justices to the Supreme Court. Said Graham in Greenville last week, “I’ll put my record as a pro-life politician against anybody in this country… I’m a lifelong NRA member.” It should be noted that alleged, staunch pro-lifer and gun rights advocate Graham has done very little to actually overturn Roe vs. Wade or federal gun laws, but has worked overtime to promote TARP, cap and trade, and amnesty for illegal aliens.
Perhaps an even better example of Graham’s posturing was his bi-polar treatment of liberal Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Said Graham at first “When I look at her record, her ideology, I’m deeply troubled.” The Daily Beast even ran the headline “Lindsey Graham Attacks Sotomayor.” A few short weeks later, Graham became the sole Republican on the senate judiciary committee to confirm Sotomayor.
The biggest difference between the so-called “balloon boy” and Graham, is that the six-year-old finally admitted his disingenuousness. Sheriff Jim Alderden, who worked on the runaway balloon case, rightly noted that the boy’s family had “put on a very good show for us, and we bought it.” Graham and his Republican Party have put on a show for years—millions of conservative voters have bought it—and yet the GOP still refuses to fess up. Said Graham of his critics without the slightest hint of irony, “The reason I can stand up there and smile confidently and tell them I disagree is I know that most people are with me.”
Whether conservatives continue to buy Graham’s hot-air is something only time will tell. But rest assured that in the meantime, Lindsey Graham and similar self-described “conservatives” will never admit to their hoax—and worse—will insist that the same old Republican show must go on.
In the brief age of Obama, we have had “truthers,” “birthers,” Tea Party activists and town-hall dissenters.
Comes now, the “Oath Keepers.” And who might they be?
Writes Alan Maimon in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oath Keepers, depending on where one stands, are “either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia.”
Formed in March, they are ex-military and police who repledge themselves to defend the Constitution, even if it means disobeying orders. If the U.S. government ordered law enforcement agencies to violate Second Amendment rights by disarming the people, Oath Keepers will not obey.
“The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here,” says founding father Stewart Rhodes, an ex-Army paratrooper and Yale-trained lawyer. “My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can’t do it without them.
“We say if the American people decide it’s time for a revolution, we’ll fight with you.”
Prediction: Brother Rhodes is headed for cable stardom.
And if the Pelosi-Reid progressives went postal over town-hall protesters, calling them “un-American,” “Nazis” and “evil-mongers,” one can imagine what they will do with the Oath Keepers.
As with Jimmy Carter’s long range psychoanalysis of Joe Wilson, the reflexive reaction of the mainstream media will likely be that these are militia types, driven to irrationality because America has a black president.
Yet, the establishment’s reaction seems more problematic for the republic than anything the Oath Keepers are up to. For our political and media elite seem to have lost touch with the nation and to be wedded to a vision of America divorced from reality.
Progressives are the folks who, in the 1960s, could easily understand that urban riots that took scores of lives and destroyed billions in property were an inevitable reaction to racism, poverty and despair. They could empathize with the rage of campus radicals who burned down the ROTC building and bombed the Pentagon.
The “dirty, immoral war in Vietnam” explains why the “finest generation we have ever produced” is behaving like this, they said. We must deal with the “root causes” of social disorder.
Yet, they cannot comprehend what would motivate Middle America to distrust its government, for it surely does, as Ron Brownstein reports in the National Journal:
Whites are not only more anxious, but also more alienated. Big majorities of whites say the past year’s turmoil has diminished their confidence in government, corporations and the financial industry ... Asked which institution they trust most to make economic decisions in their interest, a plurality of whites older than 30 pick ‘none’—a grim statement.
Is all this due to Obama’s race?
Even Obama laughs at that. As he told David Letterman, I was already black by the time I was elected. And he not only got a higher share of the white vote than Kerry or Gore, a third of white voters, who said in August 2008 that race was an important consideration in voting, said they were going to vote for Obama.
With black voters going 24 to 1 for Obama, he almost surely won more votes than he lost because of his race.
Moreover, the alienation and radicalization of white America began long before Obama arrived. He acknowledged as much when he explained Middle Pennsylvanians to puzzled progressives in that closed-door meeting in San Francisco.
Referring to the white working-class voters in the industrial towns decimated by job losses, Obama said: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Yet, we had seen these folks before. They were Perotistas in 1992, opposed NAFTA in 1993, and blocked the Bush-Kennedy McCain amnesty in 2007.
In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates.
They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country, are rewarded with free educations and health care, and take jobs at lower pay than American families can live on—then carry Mexican flags in American cities and demand U.S. citizenship.
They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.
They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks to rescue the country from a crisis created by the government and Fortune 500 corporations and banks.
America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.
Steve Sailer leaps straight from the fact that most of the top NFL quarterback statistics have been compiled by players of the last generation and this one to the conclusion that today’s quarterbacks are better than those of days gone by. In doing so, he has bought the hype.
When I was in the eighth grade, in 1976-77, my football coaches showed us a training film on offensive fundamentals. Made by Vince Lombardi and his Green Bay Packers in the 1960s, this black-and-white spectacular featured several Hall of Fame offensive linemen demonstrating the techniques I needed to use.
So, if memory serves, there were Fuzzy Thurston and Jerry Kramer pass blocking with their elbows bent so that their hands would not leave the general vicinity of their chests. For them to have pass blocked otherwise would likely have earned them a 15-yard penalty for holding.
Today, however, the penalty for offensive holding is not 15, but 10 yards. Besides that, on every snap, every offensive lineman in the NFL blocks in a way that would have been holding for Lombardi’s men.
When I was a boy, my heroes, like Carl Eller of the Minnesota Vikings, treated quarterbacks very roughly. They drove them into the ground or stood them up so someone else could take a shot. In the late 1970s, however, the NFL changed its rules so that quarterbacks were, as the Steelers’ Jack Lambert spat, effectively put in tutus. Mustn’t hurt the little darlings by hitting them the way you’d hit any other player who had the ball.
Oh, yes, and when Johnny Unitas scanned the field for wideout Raymond Barry, he was apt to see him being shoved around the field by a DB playing bump-and-run. Now, a DB mustn’t touch a WR more than five yards down the field. That wouldn’t be nice.
So, yes, the QBs today rack up lots of statistics. Can anyone say “grade inflation?” Nevermore will there be Super Bowls like # VII (14-7 final, with basically no offense the whole day) or #IX (2-0 at halftime, despite the presence of multiple Hall of Fame performers on both offenses, including both quarterbacks). To my mind, making it easy for any team to score did not improve the game—and Drew Bledsoe was no Terry Bradshaw, despite his gaudier numbers.
What would happen if Barry Manilow and Woodrow Wilson had a lovechild? I’m not sure, but I have a sinking feeling the unlucky spawn would grow into something like Bono Vox.
Unlike other “rockers with a conscience,” Bono has gone to great lengths to make it known that he actually studies the issues. This does seem true; he is definitely more thoughtful than your average Rock the Vote blowhard. That makes his naive NYT op-ed about Obama’s Peace Prize all the more annoying. Bono writes:
“We will support the Millennium Development Goals, and approach next year’s summit with a global plan to make them a reality. And we will set our sights on the eradication of extreme poverty in our time.”
They’re not my words, they’re your president’s. If they’re not familiar, it’s because they didn’t make many headlines. But for me, these 36 words are why I believe Mr. Obama could well be a force for peace and prosperity.”
Had Obama uttered these words during his first day in office, and were Bono responding to them on day two, perhaps the rocker could be forgiven. The problem is they came several months into Obama’s presidency, after Barack had already pulled shenanigans like attacking Pakistan. Bono might want to get on the ZooTV phone and ask the Pakistanis how they’re liking that peace and prosperity.
Lest we forget, George W. Bush also made bold, idealistic statements early in his reign, like when he vowed to “rid the world of the evil-doers.” We all witnessed (and continue to witness) the legacy of that thundering gibberish. But because Bono seems determined to remain ga-ga over Barack, he manages to ignore how much the new President’s actions already conflict with his high-minded words.
Vox goes on to share this:
These new steps — and those 36 words — remind the world that America is not just a country but an idea, a great idea about opportunity for all and responsibility to your fellow man.
Incurable dreamers relinquish bladder control when discussing the allegedly utopian idea of America. Conveniently, they always seem to leave out the less utopian parts of that idea.
Furthermore, the broad tone of this op-ed is an ode to Obama‘s pledges for “a global plan,” which in practice means sacrificing American sovereignty to less than accountable international bodies. Isn’t it interesting that these democracy worshippers are always looking to dilute democracy by empowering the unelected? They want democracy everywhere, except in those places they wish to meddle (which pretty much means everywhere).
I am always happy to hear Bono announcing what is best for my money, since that is all these foreign aid Ponzi schemes amount to. I couldn’t be more delighted to watch someone I didn’t elect, and who isn’t a citizen of my country, looking for new places to blow my lucre. I would like to tell Mr. Vox to fund his own lemons with his own funds, but alas, my pleas would fall on tone deaf ears. A megalomaniac always considers it a birthright to put other people’s money where his mouth is.
I’ll muster one and half cheers for Eric Holder’s decision not to prosecute cannabis users who obey state “medical marijuana” laws. The good news is that we might be one step closer to legalizing a substance that has definite healing and pain-relieving properties and as recreational drug is more benign than booze. The bad news is that if legalization takes place, the federal government will tax marijuana till the seeds squeak, as Dan Flynn argued at Takimag a little while back.
A bud bureaucracy, dubbed the Cannabis Control Authority, would act as a quasi-judiciary/legislature/executive on all matters marijuana. Seven gubernatorial appointees, serving for seven-year terms at salaries 20 percent of the governor’s, would comprise the board. It would issue and revoke licenses, make rules, collect taxes, subpoena witnesses, and even refer to the courts for sixty days of jail time those who don’t cooperate with them—a penalty harsher than just about any marijuana-smoking scofflaw received before decriminalization went into effect on January 2. With an FBI investigation charging several high-profile Boston politicians with bribery in connection to meting out prized liquor licenses, it’s not difficult to see the marijuana trade going to pot once elected crooks get involved.
And small businessmen Mark and Charlie have no plans to open up their life’s work to elected crooks. “If you had to pay the licensing fee, it wouldn’t necessarily be cost prohibitive,” Mark concedes. “But with the taxes, your clientele is going to disappear. A lot of people would just balk at paying that.” Instead of patronizing overpriced, state-licensed dealers, legalization would perversely orient pot smokers toward the same underground dealers, like Mark and Charlie, that they have always relied on for ounces, quarter bags, and mere joints.
Paying tax on bong hits to fund banker bailouts sounds like a pretty terrible arrangement to me.
We staunch conservatives have always admired the great Edmund Burke. Burke, the man who stood for chivalry in the age of mass democracy. Burke, one of the first to recognize the totalitarian, murderous end point to which the logic of the French Revolution inevitably led. Burke, who sympathized with the American Revolutionaries as defenders of their rights as Englishmen.
But then let’s not forget Burke, who advocated for equal pay for women in the workplace. Burke, who sought to crush the racist elements in American society that stood in the way of African-American entrepreneurship. Burke, who dreamed that one day the Republican Party might reach out to Hispanics as a reliable voting base!
What? You don’t recognize that Edmund Burke? Well, that just means you haven’t yet visited the webpage of The Edmund Burke Institute for American Renewal (“A New Generation of Conservative Thought”). Here are some snippets to help you bring yourself up to date with what you should believe as a reactionary:
New Feminism
This program is designed to show how conservative principles affirm the fundamental rights, values and liberties of women; there is no contradiction between conservatism and feminism. We want to help women achieve equality in the workplace, play a greater role in the nation’s political life, and remove any remaining barriers hindering their potential. We also envision a distinct role for women in public affairs that fulfils their feminine nature. […]
African Americans and Traditional Values
We seek to place the issues dear to African Americans at the forefront of political debate. This program will find solutions that are based on empowerment, independence and entrepreneurship. We celebrate the history and culture of African Americans and affirm their contributions to American society. Furthermore, the program recognizes that there are still racist elements in American society that must be crushed. Hence, we will be vigilant in defending African Americans from injustice and inequality. […]
Hispanics and the Conservative Movement
We will integrate Hispanics within the conservative movement. There are millions of diligent and talented Hispanics in America who have a Christian heritage, hold dear to traditions which exalt the family and the community, and who are determined to improve their economic standing. These traits render them natural allies of conservatives. Our program will highlight the specific concerns of Hispanics regarding immigration, achieving greater social mobility and entrance into the highest echelons of power. Moreover, Hispanics will finally feel welcome in a movement that empowers them to achieve their goals while also celebrates their cultural contributions to American society.
If this is the Right, then what need have we for a Left?
How Lindsey Graham-style “conservatism” is anything but, and why there’s signs that the South Carolina Senator and his Republican Party might not be able to pull off their hoax forever.
Since Steve Sailer has had two recent pieces at Takimag focusing on football, I feel emboldened to write on the topic as well. As of now, Notre Dame quarterback Jimmy Clausen should be the frontrunner for the Heisman Trophy. He is certainly the best college quarterback in the country right now. These are his cumulative statistics: 124 completions out of 191 pass attempts, with 14 touchdown passes and only 2 interceptions, with a passer efficiency rating of 166.4 and an average of 300.7 passing yards per game. And since the second quarter of the Michigan State game, he has been doing this with turf toe, which has noticeably hobbled him at times and caused him to sit out for over a quarter against Purdue.
This past weekend, Clausen went up against USC’s pass defense, the best in the country, which had not given up a passing touchdown before playing Clausen. As you may have heard, USC won, 34-27. But Clausen threw for two TD passes and ran for one more, and would have had a third if his intended receiver hadn’t slipped on the final play of the game. And one of these passes was just extraordinary, a 55 yard pass into double coverage that could not have been more on target. You can see that pass here, at 2:42 minutes in. (You can also see the catch on the final drive that I thought was a touchdown, even though the refs disagreed, at 5:28 minutes in). USC never intercepted Clausen, who didn’t throw a pass the Trojans had a shot of picking off all day. In fact, Clausen has become an excellent decisionmaker this season, rarely throwing a bad pass. And how have some of Clausen’s Heisman competitors fared against top defenses? Tim Tebow’s Florida Gators scored only 13 points against LSU and Colt McCoy’s Texas Longhorns put up just 16 points against Oklahoma, with Tebow and McCoy each having one touchdown and one interception. Florida and LSU won those games because their defenses are better than Notre Dame’s, not because their quarterbacks are better.
Of course, it’s possible that Clausen’s performance will fall off, and Barack Obama is likely to win the Heisman anyway. But if the Heisman were handed out today, Clausen should win it.
I was once asked to imagine what the world would look like today had North American settlers snubbed the African slave traders in the 18th and 19th centuries. We can let our imaginations run wild with speculation, but one thing is certain: had the slave markets in Africa been starved of custom, our Pop music charts would look nothing like they do today.
Most of mainstream Pop nowadays is African-American in either origin or derivation, even if the musicians playing it are not. Indeed, one is hard pressed to find even a nanosecond of music in the charts that is quintessentially European in its sensibility. The fact that music derived from African-American creativity has come to enjoy maximum visibility in contemporary mainstream culture, however, says more about the policies of corporate record labels and the mass media of news and entertainment than it does about the quality of music originating in the European soul on either side of the Atlantic. This music is alive and well, I am happy to report, thriving purer and truer than ever, aloof from—and completely ignored by—the brainless and banal MTV sausage factory.
What does this music sound like?
I should perhaps use the plural, for there are several genres worthy of examination: Neo-Folk, Martial Industrial, and various forms of extreme Metal, including Black Metal, Folk Metal, and Viking Metal. I can speak with most authority on the latter three genres, but my reflections apply to all of the above-mentioned musical forms.
Obviously, Black, Folk, and Viking Metal grew out of Heavy Metal, but ought not be considered of equivalent worth to the latter, for they are considerably more sophisticated in both lyrical content and approach to musical composition. Folk and Viking Metal lyrics tend to draw from pre-Christian mythology and ancient and mediaeval history, and are replete with references that are arcane to most victims of modern miseducation. Black Metal comes in many different flavors—from Satanic to suicidal to strongly nationalistic—but the lyrics generally reflect a decidedly pagan and neo-Romantic sensibility, emphasizing—always to a harrowing degree—dark emotion and obscure mysticism. Musically, they can be 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. And while many Black Metal bands favor an almost cacophonously raw and primitive sound (an approach that derives from early Punk influences), there are many others producing highly polished and accomplished albums.
These genres are also ideological in a way that their progenitor never was. Heavy Metal focused on themes related to youth and demonstrated an almost single-minded preoccupation with sex, crapulent excess, and low-brow posturing, with its frontmen displaying few commitments beyond contempt for authority. Black, Folk, and Viking Metal, on the other hand, are much more serious and emphatically völkisch cultural forms: encoded in the lyrics, the artwork, and the music we find a complete rejection of the tenets of modernism and liberalism. Artists playing this type of music despise the urban, cosmopolitan, and/or egalitarian values of our time, and the banal commercial culture that goes along with it, and instead yearn nostalgically for the organic communities, rural sensibilities, elitism, natural hierarchies, and heroic values they associate with the ancestral culture of the remote past. Theirs is a mystical conception of nature, blood, and soil, and Black Metal artists may be called “conservative revolutionary” in so much as they advocate putting an end to the liberal order, by revolutionary means if necessary, and instituting a new dispensation founded on conservative principles.(Of course, the term “conservative” must not be understood here as having anything to do with the Republicans)
This conservative Revolutionary worldview finds its American parallel with the so-called “Southern Agrarians,” a loosely aligned group of literary and cultural critics, led by Robert Penn Warren and others, who opposed modernity, urbanism, and industrialism and the general trajectory of their country during the 1920s and ‘30s. Though “politicized” in this way, Black, Folk, and Viking Metal musicians are, on the whole, uninterested in mass politics. What’s at stake for them are cultural and spiritual aspects of existence, as well the source of the West’s rapid decline. While the rockers and hippies from the 1960s posed as left-wing activists, Black, Folk, and Viking Metal albums depict primeval, bucolic, and often turbulent natural landscapes, mediaeval weaponry, pagan warriors, runes, and folkish decorative art. The world depicted is one in which the industrial revolution never took place.
Misconceptions about Metal music abound in the popular mind: it is, in fact, probably the only form of music about which mainstream types feel justified in having strong negative opinions without having heard a single note. “It’s all noise!” they exclaim, their brains throbbing with the mechanistic Techno pulse pumped in from their iPods. Metal relishes in its own marginality, but the reality is that much of it, and especially Folk and Viking Metal, is hugely engaging and entertaining: I often describe it to the curious as a fusion of folk and simplified Classical Music (particularly that from the Romantic period) with percussion and heavy electric guitars.
One can discern a certain aesthetic empathy between some extreme Metal albums and the works of Holst, Wagner, and Berlioz. And it’s no coincidence that many fans of extreme Metal also like opera and symphonic music and that many extreme Metal musicians claim to be inspired by their Classical forbearers. In some cases, such as with the Swedish band Therion, we can see a complete fusion between Metal and opera. (Therion had its origins in the Death Metal scene, but nowadays it’s very close musically to the genres under consideration here, as evinced by albums like The Secret of the Runes.)
Given the quality and sophistication of much of the musical output, it’s not difficult to understand why fans of Black, Folk, and Viking Metal are often contemptuous of mainstream Pop, regarding it as frivolous, predictable, and bland, if not downright odious. And I honestly do believe that what’s being produced within the various extreme Metal music scenes is the most artistically and technically challenging popular music of our day. Furthermore, Metal has what it takes to endure, just as the vast majority of mainstream Pop will soon thankfully be forgotten—or rather remembered only as something the multitudes bought up mostly out fear of not being considered sufficiently “cool” by their peers. The fact that mainstream Pop is much more visible and commercially active today certainly doesn’t mean that, given the choice, people would prefer it: it only means that it enjoys favor among media and entertainment industry plutocrats, who are able to advertise and promote such garbage. Pop’s ubiquity maintains its popularity: and as all humans have an innate desire for belonging, few would wish to risk marginalizing themselves through the cultivation of unfashionable tastes. Pop’s transience, as well as the vast amounts of capital required to advertise and promote it, can only be proof that its dominance in the culture is artificially maintained.
Black, Folk, and Viking Metal thrive even though they enjoy hardly any public visibility and are sustained on very limited investment. And when Metal music has enjoyed financial backing from a sizeable record label, artists have achieved impressive sales and long careers. Perhaps the best example of this is Nightwish, a symphonic Power/Gothic Metal quintet (with origins in the Black Metal scene and noticeable Classical influences), which is Finland’s most successful band, with four million albums sold, with one silver, 11 gold, and 12 platinum awards.
Black, Folk, and Viking Metal, and by extension Neo-Folk and Martial Industrial, are immensely beneficial for the European soul, and most welcome in our troubled times. For there is no denying, and I am certainly not alone in thinking this, that a form of music that is quintessentially European in character, with deep roots in European history, mythology, and tradition, is infinitely more likely to revitalize Western man than the spiritually destructive fare of modern mainstream Pop, almost all of which is soaked through with everything we spend our time criticizing on webzines like Takimag. Even if we forget for a moment the “cop killer” posturing Gangsta Rap, we still cannot see it as beneficial to the West that its cultural forms are—and have been for decades—systematically displaced, de-emphasized, and made compatible with global mass entertainment. The rest is piano recitals.
One wonders if our present media, academic, and political establishment is aware of the disruptive, “subversive,” and emphatically European aspects of a genre of music that’s still just outside its control. At any rate, let’s hope that Jacques Attali
Apparently “f&ck” has replaced “God” as the most popular word in the English language. Just the other morning, I was getting my latte at the World’s End Starbucks when I overheard two grown men having a row. The men were standing with their respective bicycles on two sides of a lamppost. The man whose bicycle had been scratched by a maladroit man was telling him to “f%ck off.” How eloquent! And what a nice way to start the day, I though to myself. He simply had no sense of decorum (Asshole!) Couldn’t he have thought of something better? Say … “Have a nice day, stumblebum.” But, a statement like this would have required a pause, and, God help us, a thought. Difficult, I know, but not impossible. I am grateful that the two men were arguing over bicycles and not Range Rovers or long-range missiles. But when I witness the monstrous ways humans treat one another, I am curious about why people continually accept ludicrous and cantankerous conventions?
The standard “f@ck you” carries its weight, no doubt, but it is simply over used, and frankly, I get very offended when I hear it. “F#ck” should be verboten, unless, of course, it’s used in reference to a good f¥ck, a simple fΩck, a f∆ck-wit, or the like. Then I am okay with it. People love “f®ck” because of its versatility. I’ll give them that, but must we be so redundant? I suppose this is no surprise, we love embellishment, especially when we have come up with something clever. Fπck is pretty darn brilliant—and the act itself is nifty, too. But when almost every other word out of a person’s mouth is fck, I wish I were deaf.
How to express anger and vexation is a lot of what’s at issue with all this “f™cking, f¢ck, f$ckit” business. In reaction to moronic individuals, and my own lack of nerve, I sometimes think up long contemptuous speeches when I’m alone and fantasize about delivering them to guilty parties. I usually manage to let my anger pass before launching into an actual arm-waving diatribe, but not before a hefty internal struggle. Yesterday, for example, I spent a good part of the day in a state of total frustration because I couldn’t get two simple words out of a person I had gone out of my way to help. I did a number of things in support of this person’s project. But once I had finished, not only did the person in question try to get more out of me, he never thanked me. I suppose I’m the chump for expecting such formality. I should have known better, after all, no good deed…. In the end, I managed to restrain my venom.
Just as we moderns fail at properly expressing anger, we also find it hard to summon grace and gratitude. And this crippling sense of moral outrage the whole situation puts me in is no way to live. One squanders invaluable periods in indignant moods, thinking up ways to school thoughtless and ill-mannered people. It seems a great waste of time better spent mastering English. Furthermore, only a foolish, egomaniacal person would try to bruise an incorrigible soul for a petty triumph. What a nuisance. I only wish there were a simple explanation, and an easier solution. But it’s just so f☺cking hard to express oneself these days!
Put simply, Bernie Madoff never could have gotten away with it for as long as he did if weren’t for the Securities Exchange Commission. It’s easy to forget this fact as the agency has been granted greater regulatory powers and a few good people, Harry Markopolos most prominently, have gotten praised as whistleblowers and truth-tellers. Madoff’s scheme, which duped not just celebrities and charities but hedge funds and major Swiss institutions, is boggling in the simplicity of its design: old investors were paid off with funds from the new ones. Simple as that. SEC regulators who couldn’t pick up on this were either criminally negligent or else in on it. (As mentioned in the Inspector General’s report [pdf] on the scandal, in 2005 the SEC received a memo entitled, “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund Is a Fraud.” It had little effect.)
While most Ponzi schemers promise their victim-clients profits undreamed of, Madoff took a very different tack—he offered returns that were consistent and reliable, boring even. Most investors suspected something was up, but few thought that Madoff was pulling off something as brazen and déclassé as an actual Ponzi scheme. The most common theory was that he was using his know-how as a market-maker to “front-run” trades, that is, learn about big institutional buys and sells before they happen and then ride the wave. Again, the tacit assumption must surely have been that the SEC regulators were either oblivious buffoons or else getting a cut. The fact that SEC compliance official Eric Swanson was dating Madoff’s niece, Shana—and eventually married the woman—certainly gave people the impression that a great conviviality had arisen between regulator and regulatee.
Those who put their money with Madoff because they actually believed he was an investment maestro were, in part, taken in by the inherent moral hazard of any SEC-like organization: If “the authorities” put the stamp of approval on a business operating in the mostly highly regulated industry in the country, then why bother with due diligence?
No one at the SEC has been fired over Madoff, and many have been promoted. Arthur Levitt, the chair of the SEC from ’93-2001 (big years for Madoff), has moved on … to a top position at The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm known for its close ties with the Military Industrial Complex.
But that’s all history… But my mind has been revisiting the Madoff-SEC relationship a lot recently, especially after I learned that a 29-year-old Goldman Sachs vice president, one Adam Storch, has been named the new chief operating officer of the Security Exchange Commission.
Storch is an interesting development, in that this graduate of SUNY Buffalo seems more Boiler Room than Wall Street. John Carney, who acquired the only known photo of Storch, has also dug up this amusing tidbit:
Interestingly, Storch seems to be a big fan of Bill Clinton. At Stern, he created a website asking people to vote for Bill Clinton in the 2008 election. “Don’t stand for the 22nd Amendment!” the website implores.
Clearly, this doofus is not intended to be a power-player… Instead, he’ll serve his purpose as an insecure, timid soul who’ll defer to his old boss on everything.
When A Moveable Feast
Well, as some of you may surmise, I never made it, but one thing is for certain. Hemingway’s prose and personal heroics have inspired more young people to try their hand at writing than the ghastly Bono has been copied by wannabe rock stars. Hemingway was the first literary superstar, and I include Lord Byron, more infamous for his sexual shenanigans than his romantic poetry, the latter only read by a few elite. A Moveable Feast was an instant bestseller, and it was as good as anything Hemingway had written throughout his life. I am now almost 12 years older than Papa was when he died, and re-reading Feast confirms the fact that Hemingway submitted only stuff he was certain was good. The beauty of the prose and the sharpness of his observations are extraordinary, especially today, what with phonies such as Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie posing as his successors. The “new” Feast has subtle changes, most of which I didn’t even notice. The original one had been assembled by his widow, Mary, whereas this one, a milder version where settling scores are concerned, comes from his immediate family and descendants. But the control the writer has over his subjects is undeniable, in both versions. They say that one should never paraphrase the classics, but this one is not paraphrased, just made nicer at times. Gertrude Stein is still described as looking like a Roman emperor, which is fine if you like your women that way, and Wyndham Lewis still has “the face of an unsuccessful rapist.”
The tragic but great Fitzgerald is, of course, there, as is Ezra Pound and other characters of Paris in the Twenties. I remember when first reading it and taking the girl that I would one day marry to the Closerie des Lillas and repeating the conversation Papa had with Ford Madox Ford in the table next to ours, according to the waiter. “What is a cad?” asks Hemingway. “A cad is someone who is not a gentleman,” says Ford. “Is Ezra a gentleman?” “Of course not, he’s an American,” answers the Brit. Papa included this vignette in order to show how envious and petty people can be about their better-off colonials. It’s real Hemingway stuff, full of heart but also subtle.
When I read that Ezra and Papa used to play tennis every morning near Boulevard St. Germain, I went looking. An apartment building had replaced the courts. Still, Paris during the Fifties and Sixties smelled of Hemingway heroes and heroines, and I can’t count the nights I spent in Jimmy’s and La Coupole posing as a Papa man. Ernest Hemingway is the American writer most frequently associated with Paris and Spain and is thus recognized in both countries. In fact the bar in the Paris R