Back to the nearest memories of humankind, 1980, when the fatuous figures of Reagan and Madame Thatcher were stalking the globe as twin pestilences, Hordes of the Things made it’s first appearance on Radio Four ( BBC ). The links should be read after listening, since they naturally are spoilers. Radio, apart from it’s life-preserving, as in rescue, or life-destroying, as in war, — though British military radio from the late Balkan Wars to Iraq in the form of the aging Clansman system was wretched enough for the soldiery to opt for using their mobiles instead if possible — services has little to commend it’s survival now; yet for the prior half of the 20th century it was more important for popular cultural enrichment than TV as a later phenomenon: fortunately, both are being obviated by the internet. Still, radio humour — as variable in quality as any other medium ( viz: mostly crap ) — supplied a need in those less advanced years; and Hordes of the Things was fairly good. However rarely repeated, the combination of actors well-known in their day, and seasoned comedic writers produced from four short episodes phrases that live in the mind. The occasional mock-shakespearian rhapsody and the underlying menace of beauty from Wagner’s finest didn’t hurt a Tolkienesque burlesque with Dragons, Eagles and Spiders. Still, ‘We are trained to be patient in the Brotherhood of Night.’ kind of haunts the mind even of those of us who are severely lacking in patience of any kind.
Quite other than it’s being comedy, there is a satire implicit upon the very worst and most despicable Liberal. The utterly sincere, and really morally pure, harmonising, well-meaning, honest idiot who horridly sees good in all and tries so hard to reconcile, that his weakness destroys himself and all that he is obligated to protect. Who genuinely thinks that competing cultures must be greeted with complacent self-destruction. Combining self-satisfied fellow-travelling, dumb moral relativism and a disgustingly feeble-minded belief in the value of all, and their good intentions, together with total disdain for those who prefer reality, makes them so worthless as to be more dangerous than a frank villain such as Bush or Clinton.
Still, as I was saying, though the contemporary in-jokes have reached the inevitable fate of all such trifles, many of the finely delivered lines resonate so as to be almost unforgettable [ Bearing in mind that everything is ultimately forgot here below... ]. Thanks to a friendly torrent this aged comedy is available here.; but also proffered as a downloadable zip which is recommended for home use.
FOOOOOOLLLL ! Now I can seeee yoou !
Name not that name within these walls, Master..
Loathsome Brothers !
Just a, a minute. There’s something strange here.
Majesteh ?
Why are there so many more wenches than hags in the village ?
The men had marched a long way, Majesteh.
Oh. Ah… yes… I see…
Beware, Agar, son of Yulfric; for no power on earth is granted without a price.
You take the counsel of that cannibal and sentence your own son to grisly death ?
Right, what is this ?
Just a mirror.
It looks like the All-Seeing Mirror of Ganst, whose power lies by reflecting deep into the souls of the fallen…
Reproduction.
And all these axes here, magic helms and articles of torture ?
Collector’s Items.
I don’t doubt it Yulfric, but what sortof collector ?
This suggests the fascinating possibility that the key for a group intending to turn Europeans against themselves is to trigger their strong tendency toward altruistic punishment by convincing them of the moral blameworthiness of their own people. Because Europeans are individualists at heart, they readily rise up in moral anger against their own people once they are seen as free riders and therefore morally blameworthy — a manifestation of their stronger tendency toward altruistic punishment deriving from their evolutionary past as hunter gatherers. In making judgments of altruistic punishment, relative genetic distance is irrelevant. Free-riders are seen as strangers in a market situation; i.e., they have no familial or tribal connection with the altruistic punisher.
As a very interesting and influential European group, the Puritans exemplified this tendency toward altruistic punishment. A defining feature of Puritanism was the tendency to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues — their susceptibility to utopian appeals to a ‘higher law’ and the belief that government’s principal purpose is moral. New England was the most fertile ground for “the perfectibility of man creed,” and the “father of a dozen ‘isms’.” There was a tendency to paint political alternatives as starkly contrasting moral imperatives, with one side portrayed as evil incarnate — inspired by the devil. Puritan moral intensity can also be seen in their “profound personal piety” — their intensity of commitment to live not only a holy life, but also a sober and industrious life.
Puritans waged holy war on behalf of moral righteousness even against their own genetic cousins. The suggestion is that this is a form of altruistic punishment found more often among cooperative hunter-gatherer groups than among groups based on extended kinship. For example, whatever the political and economic complexities that led to the Civil War, it was the Yankee moral condemnation of slavery that inspired the rhetoric and rendered the massive carnage of closely related Anglo-Americans on behalf of slaves from Africa justifiable in the minds of Puritans. Militarily, the war with the Confederacy rendered the heaviest sacrifice in lives and property ever made by Americans. Puritan moral fervor and its tendency to justify draconian punishment of evil doers can also be seen in the comments of “the Congregationalist minister at Henry Ward Beecher’s Old Plymouth Church in New York [who] went so far as to call for ‘exterminating the German people . . . the sterilization of 10,000,000 German soldiers and the segregation of the woman,.”
Thus the current altruistic punishment so characteristic of contemporary Western civilization: Once Europeans were convinced that their own people were morally bankrupt, any and all means of punishment should be used against their own people. Rather than see other Europeans as part of an encompassing ethnic and tribal community, fellow Europeans were seen as morally blameworthy and the appropriate target of altruistic punishment. For Westerners, morality is individualistic — violations of communal norms by free riders are punished by altruistic aggression.
Guilt is rather necessary, for we ought to know what we are; but it is also necessary to discard it as mere vainglorious self-obsession once past fault is recognised and subsumed. Natürlich, some of us find it easier than others; but that’s just through rigorous self-training ( or something ) — which is far less complacent than the opposite urge to purge another’s guilt. And certainly beats killing or self-killing to satisfy a ridiculous moral ego…
Last night I idly considered the tragic life and death of Anna Nicole Smith, and wondered why the keepers of Amerika still have not yet transformed the Statue of Liberty into her likeness — for that life and death perfectly capture the parallel destiny of the land… A century ago George S. Viereck wrote this predictive fantasy. He was quintessentially an odd bird, and despite some sympathy for his Hohenzollern cousins was rather a teutonophile than in any way royalist, yet his Germanic imagination qualified him as a seer.
PRELUDE
THE EMPIRE CITY
HUGE steel-ribbed monsters rise into the air
Her Babylonian towers, while on high
Like gilt-scaled serpents glide the swift trains by,
Or, underfoot, creep to their secret lair.
A thousand lights are jewels in her hair,
The sea her girdle, and her crown the sky,
Her life-blood throbs, the fevered pulses fly,
Immense, defiant, breathless she stands there
And ever listens in the ceaseless din,
Waiting for him, her lover who shall come,
Whose singing lips shall boldly claim their own
And render sonant what in her was dumb:
The splendour and the madness and the sin,
Her dreams in iron and her thoughts of stone.
I
NINEVEH
O NINEVEH, thy realm is set
Upon a base of rock and steel
From where the under-rivers fret
High up to where the planets reel.
Clad in a blazing coat of mail,
Above the gables of the town
Huge dragons with a monstrous trail
Have pillared pathways up and down.
And in the bowels of the deep
Where no man sees the gladdening sun,
All night without the balm of sleep
The human tide rolls on and on.
The Hudson’s mighty waters lave
In stern caress thy granite shore,
And to thy port the salt sea wave
Brings oil and wine and precious ore.
Yet if the ocean in its might
Should rise confounding stream and bay,
The stain of one delirious night
Not all the tides can wash away.
Thick pours the smoke of thousand fires,
Life throbs and beats relentlessly —
But lo, above the stately spires
Two lemans: Death and Leprosy.
What fruit shall spring from such embrace ?
Ah, even thou wouldst quake to hear !
He bends to kiss her loathsome face,
She laughs — and whispers in his ear.
Sit not too proudly on thy throne,
Think on thy sisters, them that fell;
Not all the hosts of Babylon
Could save her from the jaws of hell.
II
Through the long alleys of the park
On noiseless wheels and delicate springs,
Glide painted women fair and dark,
Bedecked with silks and jewelled things.
In peacock splendour goes the rout
With shrill, loud laughter of the mad —
Red lips to suck thy life-blood out,
And eyes too weary to be sad !
Their feet go down to shameful death,
They flaunt the livery of their wrong,
Their beauty is of Ashtoreth,
Her strength it is that makes them strong.
Behold thy virgin daughters, how
They know the smile a wanton wears;
And oh ! on many a boyish brow
The blood-red brand of murder flares.
See, through the crowded streets they fly,
Like doves before the gathering storm.
They cannot rest, for ceaselessly
In every heart there dwells a worm.
They sing in mimic joy, and crown
Their temples to the flutes of sin;
But no sweet noise shall ever drown
The whisper of the worm within.
They revel in the gilded line
Of lamplit halls to charm the night,
But think you that the crimson wine
Can veil the horror from their sight ?
Ah, no — their staring eyes are led
To where it lurks with hideous leer:
Therefore the women flush so red,
And all the men are white with fear.
As in a mansion vowed to lust,
Where wantons with their guests make free,
‘Tis thus thou humblest in the dust
Thy queenly body, Nineveh !
Thy course is downward; ’tis the road
To sins that even where disgrace
And shameful pleasure walk abroad
Dare not unmask their shrouded face !
Surely at last shall come the day
When these that dance so merrily
Shall watch with terrible faces gray
Thy doom draw near, O Nineveh !
III
I, too, the fatal harvest gained
Of them that sow with seed of fire
In passion’s garden — I have drained
The goblet of thy sick desire.
I from thy love had bitter bliss,
And ever in my memory stir
The after-savours of thy kiss —
The taste of aloes and of myrrh.
And yet I love thee, love unblessed
The poison of thy wanton’s art;
Though thou be sister to the Pest
In thy great hands I lay my heart !
And when thy body Titan-strong
Writhes on its giant couch of sin,
Yea, though upon the trembling throng
The very vault of Heaven fall in;
And though the palace of thy feasts
Sink crumbling in a fiery sea —
l, like, the last of Baal’s priests,
Will share thy doom, O Nineveh.
The doom of our culture was already well upon it’s way by the time of the Second World War — or War of the Republics as I would prefer it to be known, since this was conducted entirely betwixt differing republican systems, all equally loathsome. Possibly not Japan, I guess, since it was at least nominally a monarchy, although cursory search indicates it was more of a constitutional monarchy. WWII may be summarized as that the nazis were detestable; the western allies despicable; and the communists disgusting.
The Russians had reverted to becoming savages by 1945: the Americans maintained their customary anthropological status as barbarians. Their especially barbaric political system of representative democracy had grave consequence as victors… The very first moralistic theatre was the judicial murder of General Anton Dostler, of which may be read here, written by the son of his American defense counsel. Essentially, 15 American soldiers were captured disguised as Italian civilians, and the — non-nazi — General referred the case to Kesselring, who ordered them to be executed. Admittedly Smiling Albert had enough to occupy his mind right then without giving this a great deal of thought, but under the laws of war this was a done deal anyway. It is pointless to object or blame soldiers for disguising; it is equally pointless to object to the consequence — which procedure is actually there to protect civilians. Thus although guiltless — neither prosecutor nor defence expected anything except acquittal — General Dostler was then sentenced to death after new instructions were handed down from Washington in response to the revelation that the prosecution would fail, that is that henceforth in these trials hearsay evidence would be admissible. This was to satisfy the voting constituents. Democracy is awesomely repellent not merely in practice, but still more so in idealist theory…
‘Hope to God we never lose a war.’ said the prosecutor.
As two world-outlooks, two modes of blood-flow in the veins and of thought in the daily being and doing, are interwoven, there arise in the end ( in every Culture ) two sorts of moral, of which each looks down upon the other — namely, noble custom, and priestly askesis, reciprocally censured as worldly and as servile. It has been shown already how the one proceeds from the castle and the other from the cloister and the minster, the one from full being in the flood of History and the other, aloof therefrom, out of pure waking-consciousness in the ambiance of a God-pervaded nature. The force with which these primary impressions act upon men is something that later periods will be unable even to imagine. The secular and the spiritual class-feeling are starting on their upward career, and cutting out for themselves an ethical class-ideal which is accessible only to the right people, and even to them only by way of long and strict schooling. The great being-stream feels itself as a unit as against the residue of dull, pulseless, and aimless blood. The great mind-community knows itself as a unit as against the residue of uninitiated. These units are the band of heroes and the community of saints.
It will always remain the great merit of Nietzsche that he was the first to recognize the dual nature of all moral. His designations of “master-” and “slave-” moral were inexact, and his presentation of “Christianity” placed it much too definitely on the one side of the dividing line, but at the basis of all his opinions this lies strong and clear, that good and bad are aristocratic, and good and evil priestly, distinctions. Good and bad, which are Totemistic distinctions among primitive groups of men and tribes, describe, not dispositions, but men, and describe them comprehensively in respect of their living-being. The good are the powerful, the rich, the fortunate. Good means strong, brave, thoroughbred, in the idiom of every Springtime. Bad, cheap, wretched, common, in the original sense, are the powerless, propertyless, unfortunate, cowardly, negligible — the “sons of nobody” as ancient Egypt said. Good and evil, Taboo concepts, assign value to a man according to his perceptions and reason — that is, his waking disposition and his conscious actions. To offend against love-ethic in the race sense is ungentle, to sin against the Church’s love-command is wicked. The noble habit is the perfectly unconscious result of a long and continuous training. It is learned in intercourse and not from books. It is a felt rhythm, and not a notion. But the other moral is enunciated, ordered on the basis of cause and consequence, and therefore learnable and expressive of a conviction.
The one is historical through and through, and recognizes rank-distinctions and privileges as actual and axiomatic. Honour is always class-honour — there is no such thing as an “honour of humanity.” The duel is not an obligation of unfree persons. Every man, be he Bedouin or Samurai or Corsican, peasant or workman, judge or bandit, has his own binding notions of honour, loyalty, courage, revenge, that do not apply to other kinds of life. Every life has custom-ethic — it is unthinkable without it. Children have it already in their play; they know at once, of themselves, what is fitting. No one has laid down these rules, but they exist. They arise, quite unconsciously, out of the “we” that has formed itself out of the uniform pulse of the group. Here, too, each being is “in form.” Every crowd that, under one or another stimulus, has collected in the street has for the moment its own ethic, and anyone who does not absorb it and stand for it as self-evident — to say “follow it” would presume more rationality in the action than there is — is a poor, mean creature, an outsider. Uneducated people and children possess an astonishingly fine reactivity to this. Children, however, are also required to learn the Catechism, and in it they hear about the good and evil that are laid down and are any thing rather than self-evident. Custom-ethic is not that which is true, but that which is there; it is a thing of birth and growth, feeling and organic logic. Moral, in contrast to this, is never actuality ( for, if it were, all the world would be saintly ), but an eternal demand hanging over the consciousness and, ex hypothesi, over that of all men alike, irrespective of all differences of actual life and history. And, therefore, all moral is negative and all custom-ethic affirmative. In the latter “devoid of honour” is the worst, in the former “devoid of sin” is the highest, that can be said of anyone.
The basic concept of all living custom-ethic is honour. Everything else — loyalty, modesty, bravery, chivalry, self-control, resolution is comprised in it. And honour is a matter of the blood and not of the reason. One does not reflect on a point of honour — that is already dishonour. To lose honour means to be annulled so far as Life and Time and History are concerned. The honour of one’s class, one’s family, of man and woman, of one’s people and one’s country, the honour of peasant and soldier and even bandit honour means that the life in a person is something that has worth, historical dignity, delicacy, nobility. It belongs to directional Time, as sin belongs to timeless Space. To have honour in one’s body means about the same as to have race. The opposite sort are the Thersites-natures, the mud-souled, the riff-raff, the “kick-me-but-let-me-live’s.” To submit to insult, to forget a humiliation, to quail before an enemy — all these are signs of a life become worthless and superfluous. But this is not at all the same thing as priestly moral, for that moral does not cleave to life at any cost of degradation, but rather rejects and abstains from life as such, and therefore incidentally from honour. As has been said already, every moral action is, at the very bottom, a piece of askesis and a killing of being. And eo ipso it stands outside the field of life and the world of history.
Oswald Spengler : The Decline of the West [ Vol II, Chap. 10 ]
Lingering self-respect has oftimes preserved me — ‘gainst all temptations — from the more egregious effects of the zeitgeist of sentimentality: a modest pride holds in that I have nevereverseen either It’s A Wonderful Life or The Wizard Of Oz, f’rinstance. Now, Upton Sinclair was a notable story-teller, but a Hemingwayesquely poor writer — ‘What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke ?‘ as Gore Vidal wrote of his native land — and his themes here are rather trite; bad capitalists… bad religion… exploiters… the family saga genre… so it’s rather unlikely I shall bother to watch There Will Be Blood. Having a nearly all-male crew probably clinches it — single sex movies suck as much as single sex communities… However the title is awfully good — especially considering the vast importance of titling and it’s common neglect — so I tried to find from whence it came.
It makes good on the film’s title, which may be taken from Lord Byron. “The king-times are fast finishing,” he said. “There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist. But the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it.”
This is pretty painful stuff even for Byron, who ever veered precariously betwixt plodding doggerel and occasionally splendid fustian, and rarely hit the rocks of glorious lyricism. And as with Marx — But Hubbard’s superb record for inaccuracy of statement clouded any of his positive remarks with a fog of doubt. to quote Stewart H. Holbrook on a notable capitalist of the latter’s era — it’s not easy to ascertain the finished construct of the promised Paradise: presumably it will include peace, love, harmony, compulsory gender and racial equality, an incredible amount of daily uplift though one way communication, and a total absence of thought. Or, let us say, no class whatsoever.
Fortunately though, the probably ever-reliable China Daily gave the definitive origin:
Smite The Waters
The film’s resonantly Old Testament title comes from the seventh chapter of Exodus where God, via Moses, orders Aaron to smite the waters so that “they may become blood; and that there may be blood throughout all the land of Egypt“. In the context of the film this biblical blood is oil, the contaminating element dealt in by its forceful central character.
The Bible is so beautiful…
[sarc] And God said, “Let there be Blood.” [/sarc].
***
More importantly, a link from the China Daily went on to better news; in Düsseldorf the police are equipping their dogs with shoes.
Small, Medium And Large
“All 20 of our police dogs — German and Belgian shepherds — are currently being trained to walk in these shoes,” Andre Hartwich said. “I’m not sure they like it, but they’ll have to get used to it.”
The unusual footwear is not a fashion statement, Hartwich said, but rather a necessity due to the high rate of paw injuries on duty. Especially in the city’s historical old town — famous for both its pubs and drunken revelers — the dogs often step into broken beer bottles.
“Even the street-cleaning doesn’t manage to remove all the glass pieces from between the streets’ cobble stones,” Hartwich said, adding that the dogs frequently get injured by little pieces sticking deep in their paws.
The dogs will start wearing the shoes this spring but only during operations that demand special foot protection. The shoes comes in sizes small, medium and large and were ordered in blue to match the officers uniforms, Hartwich said.
It’s rarely one sees police-dogs in Great Britain — nearly as rarely as police-horses — but I hope they institute it here: broken glass on the streets, however, is not rare at all. [ If randomly picking up shards, I've found that one hand can hold a dozen of any size, but not more; and of course, one can only fill one hand... ]
I was born in Düsseldorf, and that is why they call me Rolf…
The topiary tree formed as a profusion of carved nephrite, finely veined leaves and jeweled fruit and flowers on an intricate framework of branches, the fruit formed by champagne diamonds, amethysts, pale rubies and citrines, the flowers enameled white and set with diamonds, a keyhole and a tiny lever, hidden among the leaves, when activated open the hinged circular top of the tree and a feathered songbird rises, flaps its wings, turns its head, opens its beak and sings, the gold trunk chased to imitate bark and planted in gold soil is contained in a white quartz tub applied with a gold trellis chased with flowerheads at the intersections and further applied with swags of berried laurel enameled translucent green and pinned by cabochon rubies, the central rubies edged by diamonds, each foot of the tub also applied with chased gold rosettes set with cabochon rubies and diamonds, the corners of the tub with pearl finials, the square carved nephrite base in two steps with a miniature nephrite fluted column at each corner set with chased gold mounts, each column with a reeded gold cap surmounted by a pearl nestled in translucent green enamel leaves, the swinging gold chains between the columns formed as pearl flowers with translucent green enamel leaves.
Occasionally, as still more with Erté, part of the slickness causes wariness, yet as Fabergé’s skill astounds, the sheer swaggering inutility redeems any doubts. However in the end, like power and lands, art eventually temporarily ends up, via passing revolutionaries into the hands of base millionaires before they too die, unwept and unsung — and wholly unremembered. Even uglier is the next fate of possessions — passions — of individual monarchs and people transmuted into a disgusting ‘National’ heritage for all, dead in state museums and owned by no-one.
It is taken as a rule that whenever, and no matter in which context, a personal pronoun is used, the speaker is — hopefully unconsciously — boasting. Still, I have identified my major flaw and can’t really feel it increases self-esteem. I am incapable of reverence. This might be a coded way of saying rebellious, were it not for the fact that as a reactionary traditionalist I’ve never seen the point in rebellion for it’s own sake save as a narcissistic attitude ( see: Shelley, and indeed, Byron ); rejection of belief seems as pointless as it’s easy acceptance, and considerably more self-dramatizing. Naturalich, I feel honour to my hereditary lord: he is God’s Vice-Gerant; then again, I am scarcely likely to meet him, even less to serve him; and no chance at all to die for him > which last should be man’s natural doom. I think it was Lord Bernard Stuart who died with his back to a tree fighting eight Roundheads; and later, as my namesake lay dying…
The Viscount then asking the said Johnston: “How the day went ?”
“The day went well for the King, but I am sorry for your Lordship.”
Claverhouse : “It is the less matter for me, seeing the day went well for my Master.”
Dying was worthwhile in those days. Now it has the same unimportance as life.
To continue, no singer or band has ever held my heart. No people or group, large or tiny, seem the least bit worthy. I can’t respect breeding, wealth or achievement, no matter what it cost the achiever; work, any work, is as only good as the result; and most present day work produces ugliness adding to the material world. As a legitimist, concurrent politics merely seem the futile gesturings of freed slaves aping the process of governance. Religion is not to be crudely disdained, even — especially —- if one is fundamentally irreligious, so short ceremonies are easy enough to be for mannered respect, but in church I’ve never felt anything except annoyance and a dislike of kneeling — and this lack of interest applies to all manifestations of the religious impulse, whether church-based, atheistic, faith in science, faith in materialism, faith in people ( all, or a selected group ), nationalism, racialism, anti-racialism, and all the creeds that mix any of these to form a cocktail of belief. And too philosophers have very little to do with a functioning spiritual life any more than economists have to do with the random workings of whatever the economy may be: both are merely theologians, only to be read for the funny bits.
Thus both religion and ethical theory fail, if just because both make enormous logical leaps by constructing the desired end — good and evil — first, then creating the theory that accounts for why they think one of these is right or wrong. There are only two pole-stars for correctness: personal honour and loyalty. So in fine, there is nothing in life that can command respect or even much admiration.
I feel horror and disgust at having lived in the decades I did, both from their and my own inadequacy: all platitudinous self-serving of both rulers and ruled nauseates; we are lucky enough to have excellent gear now, but a hideous environment to house it. Technology is excellent, yet can hardly substitute for the lack in modern life. If I go anywhere in Great Britain, I know exactly what I’ll find, no matter if I’ve never seen the area once. All towns. cars, supermarkets, garages, motorway stations, same shops everywhere — maybe a museum or gallery might be interesting for an hour, or it might be as trite as the media society that invests us all. Certainly the countryside in Europe is still pretty good in places: but you have to get further in than you see from the roadside. Culturally, the bittersweet Still Game regarding two pensioners in Glasgow pretty well sums up the dead end-game of life in Britain. I can now go anywhere, but can’t conceive of any place I want to live in.
And North America and Europe — which comprise the continents I should feel comfortable within —- are pretty much the same way. All is dullness. And the people are devoted to weakness and ineptitude. We live, as predicted, in Ressentiment World. Slaves Rule.
A few years ago an Italian friend of mine travelled by train from Boston to Providence. She had only been in America for a couple weeks and hadn’t seen much of the country yet. She arrived looking astonished. “It’s so ugly !”
People from other rich countries can scarcely imagine the squalor of the man-made bits of America. In travel books they show you mostly natural environments: the Grand Canyon, whitewater rafting, horses in a field. If you see pictures with man-made things in them, it will be either a view of the New York skyline shot from a discreet distance, or a carefully cropped image of a seacoast town in Maine.
How can it be, visitors must wonder. How can the richest country in the world look like this ?
Attempting to find via Google — an increasingly futile exercise — why the USA, which has so many marvellous resources, and so much ( misdirected ) energies, should have created rather awful urban and rural landscapes, James Howard Kunstler seems to have as much of the truth as the article in the first quote. Certainly the author over-romanticises, say the British experience, yet our countryside, both rural and wild, will still retain some beauty awhile. For naturally the rest of the world has ugliness too, and increasing with both population rises and the copying of the American and soviet models for humanity; yet it is the contrast between the vast wealth — which of course mostly ends up with the money-chosen elites — and the reality which makes America ever more depressing yet. Inevitable destruction is one thing, but still better played out before a noble and harmonious backdrop; anomie is one thing more, but still I should prefer to be alienated from a civilisation I could respect rather than the trite horror of the endgame of the last few centuries.
“Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last 50 years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy and spiritually degrading: the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the ‘gourmet mansardic’ junk-food joints, the Orwellian office ‘parks’ featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call ‘growth.’ [ Book: The Geography of Nowhere ]“
…
With very few exceptions, our cities are hollowed out ruins. Our towns have committed ritualized suicide in thrall to the WalMart God. Most Americans live in suburban habitats that are isolating, disaggregated, and neurologically punishing, and from which every last human quality unrelated to shopping convenience and personal hygiene has been expunged. We live in places where virtually no activity or service can be accessed without driving a car, and the (usually solo) journey past horrifying vistas of on-ramps and off-ramps offers no chance of a social encounter along the way. Our suburban environments have by definition destroyed the transition between the urban habitat and the rural hinterlands. In other words, we can’t walk out of town into the countryside anywhere. Our “homes,” as we have taken to calling mere mass-produced vinyl boxes at the prompting of the realtors, exist in settings leached of meaningful public space or connection to civic amenity, with all activity focused inward to the canned entertainments piped into giant receivers–where the children in particular sprawl in masturbatory trances, fondling joysticks and keyboards, engorged on Cheez Doodles and taco chips. Big and Blue in the USA
A talk by Mr. Kunstler on The Tragedy of Suburbia at Ted Talks : Mp4 video
It was easier to see what was happening if you were a visitor from a less frantically prospering land. J. B. Priestley, affronted by the impact of Texas on his English prejudices in 1954, described the ugly results with pungency in Journey Down A Rainbow. He summed up the system of increasing productivity plus high-pressure advertising and salesmanship, plus mass communications, in the word Admass — ‘the creation of the mass mind, the mass man.’ One of the characteristics of Admass was the uniformity of the food on offer. ‘If a good Admass man does not order a steak, either he is not hungry or he can’t afford the price.’ Between Fort Worth and Dallas he found the nomads wandering from motel to motel, ‘the tuneless gipsies of the machine age‘, along roads lined with trailer courts, gas stations, second-hand car dealers, supermarkets, drive-in banks, movie theatres and restaurants, all serving the same food, movies, television, songs and cigarettes. ‘It offers movement without any essential change,’ he wrote, ‘It is a street three thousand miles long. You burn 150 gallons of gasoline to arrive nowhere.’ This pattern of life was being copied in Britain and all over the motorized world with greater or less fidelity.
Priestley’s warning was that it was essentially a cheat. It did not offer more choice but less than there was before. The freedom to wander at will is illusory if all fhe destinations are indistinguishable. ‘The people who live there are dissatisfied, restless and bitter,’ he warned, ‘Especially the women — still girls in a mining camp‘. It may be unfair to picture the horrors of Texas as if they are worse than the horrors of industrial Britain. The motel-supermarket-hamburger civilization has now been superimposed on what was left of nineteenth-century towns, and has further worn down the differences between one region and the next.
Although uninterested in automobiles, I’m terribly fond of my little Pajero, ‘Baby’, as I call her without the faintest trace of mawkishness. Certainly she may lack a dainty grace, but she could go through a large crowd of people in 10 seconds. She looks like this ( except goldish champagne ):
Yesterday I went to the dentist in Ipswich keeping a wary eye out for cop-cars; keeping to the correct mileage to the sulphurous annoyance of the drivers behind; and inter alia running a red light unnoticed. After picking up some more boxes from the garage, glancing without pleasure at the rest to be moved — since we’ve not really had a summer the cold and wet inculcates mould —- I left Baby in a multi-story since cars there attract less attention than on the road. Unfortunately there were a couple of hours to kill, and this not merely reinforced my distaste for a place where I had been far too often, but emphasised how further along the road to booklessness towns are on. Two books only could I buy: of thousands of books most were modern trash, and the rest either uninteresting or read. On my own road to perdition, it shewed that I have, on most subjects, read as much as I shall ever want to. And of the few types of books I still do want to read, these are unobtainable in shops… Which is one form of defeat.
Still, and this is more a subject for a separate paper, Defeat is illusory — as much as is Victory — vital, and necessitous. It is not only part of the human condition, but the major part; and is far more enriching than the equally temporary feat of victory. Apart from the fact that without defeat we could no longer fight —- I have never heard of any commander who, lying, didn’t proclaim the ultimate aim was universal peace; peace on their terms no doubt, but boring deadly peace nonetheless — it may not be the lostness of lost causes that is the potent attraction, but that those causes being more correct than others were bound to lose, and gain a shining aura in the process. The Prussians were powerfully beaten at Jena, but their fighting there should be as cherished as that in any of their victories. And… in Valhalla both victors and defeated are created anew to battle the next day…
On the other hand, for a future post on Himmelstürmers, I came across this related page on the new GMC Yukons with pop-up Gatlings, and I can honestly say that if I ever wanted another SUV than my sweet Baby, it would be one of these. The Prussians could have used one at Jena; and it would be useful if I ever visited Jena, Louisiana.
America is a mistake, a giant mistake. Sigmund Freud
But… there’s no point to America anyway. It has no hereditary King or Emperor to provide a meaning or centre or source of law, merely a flag and whatever significance the individual places upon that object, whether entire people; particular section of the people with whom the individual identifies; continent; laws; congress; temporary chief officer, or any number of interpretations that do not coalesce into anything real. Notably because they are mere abstractions: notions with which each individual invests with his own misty preconceptions and unformed wishes. Therefore, America is not so much a mistake, as a conglomeration of millions of individual mistakes. So it has to be with all republics, including Rome and all the pseudo- [ non absolutist hereditary ] monarchies of today… Homer Simpson’s agonized question in the film from which the above title is purloined, though uniquely American in it’s self-misunderstanding, “Why does everything I whip leave me ?” is why Americans cannot combine moral courage and realism, even if — exceptionally rarely, as in the case of the current president — they possess the former quality. It is not enough to maintain a whip, whether right or wrong to wield it, there has to be a purpose in doing so: comfort, rightly derided by the Prussian exponents of Kultur against the concept of mere civilisation, is — like patriotism — not enough. The dearth of courage is not merely a consequence of the decline of the culture — this is shared in Europe and all westernised nations — nor solely from the idiots’ political system, but also stems from the very bases of the American Idea.
“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which and outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost it’s civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There remain many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales a to how realistic, reasonable and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weariness and cowardice… Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end ?…”
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 8, 1978
He added:
“The human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, exemplified by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.”
They still don’t like Alexandr…Rigour and unsentimentality repel the satisfied, complacent and weak; yet as Hermann Hesse pronounced: “People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.”, so it will never bother the great witness of our times.
I’m fairly strong on the Nature side myself. At least 80%, and I rather suspect that even for the undeniable parts of Nurture, such as prior environment and influence, a case can be made that these too are determined by the nature of those who created the environment, no matter how unwilled that creation.
Earlier, he has an interesting piece on our robotic future as regards artificial sex.
Much has been written about the sexbot phenomenon, with the skeptics focusing on the technical limitations (men make this argument) and the insistence that sexbots would not satisfy male sexual desire like real women would (women make this argument). It’s possible the technical hurdles to creating a sexually pleasing mechanical woman that could compete with real women might be too high, but assuming those hurdles are jumped, I offer the following future scenario.
etc.
Although at least this might lead to less inane chatter from those advocates who make a wishful distinction betwixt ’sex’ and ‘gender’, that might be balanced by an increase in geek chatter about hardware and programming.
Personally, although obviously much stronger on the realist wing than the romantic, I can’t think of anything more dire. Life without passion is tawdry and arid foolishness. No doubt the geeks would insist on the validity of the personality of each machine — where man’s anthromorphological urgings, strong enough in normal life, meet with the insistent deconstructualisation of actual personhood and what it means to be human promulgated by atheist philosophers looking for excuses to be what they would want to be, but lack the courage to implement — yet no matter how realistic these things could be, they would still be slaves and slaves aren’t companions. Which exemplifies that if one creates a perfect world of artifice to merely surround oneself with heaven, one remains a slave oneself.
Authenticity is not just the finest achievement, it is the only prerequisite for a valid life. Which is not to say that it is necessarily nice or good, but that like oxygen to carbon-based beings, it is necessary. Personally I’ll stick with girls.
Occasionally I write into a novel which will never be published, it regards a germanic lad called Jamie Egremont growing up in Oxfordshire; and, insofar as his limited sphere permits in a degenerate democratic society, he exemplifies the noble creed of Spengler:
The beast of prey is the highest form of active life. It represents a mode of living which requires the extreme degree of the necessity of fighting, conquering, annihilating, self-assertion. The human race ranks highly because it belongs to the class of beasts of prey. Therefore we find in man the tactics of life proper to a bold, cunning beast of prey. He lives engaged in aggression, killing, annihilation. He wants to be master in as much as he exists.
The visitor hurried in, nearly dropped his metal suitcase at what appeared to be a sly old gentleman chuckling at him but proved to be a painting, and looked around at the empty foyer. He sought a particular teacher, but had no frame of reference to find the school secretary’s office, despite the necessity of signing in in case he was a child molester. Not that it would have stopped one if they were in the habit of doing their own thing in a building with 786 souls — Lost Soulsvide James Conrad Egremont, or Dead, according to his mood — tucked about.
A tall girl was down the corridor but upon his deferential bellow scampered off as if indeed he was a pervert. He wandered around wondering which alley to choose then a smallish schoolboy of slight proportions sauntered into view.
“Hi can you tell me where to find the Secretary, son ?”
“That’s on a need to know basis.” said the boy primly. “Have you got a gun in that briefcase ?”
“Don’t be silly.”
The lad sighed, it seemed with regret, “They’re not hot on signposting in this country. Go down there, and it’s the sixth room to your right, opposite the atrium, sir.”
“Thanks, I’m looking for Mr. Pooto, the IT teacher. can you say where he might be ?”
A dreamy look came into the handsome features.
“I’m afraid he’s out of the country at the moment.” As if this was normal for teachers.
“Good God, really ? I’ve come from London. Are you having me on ?”
A faint click in the atmosphere happened.
“No,” said the boy coolly, as one not prone to having his word doubted.
“He’s in Africa, he goes every six weeks. He’s very interested in crocodilians.”
“What’s a crocodilian ?”
“The genus of Alligators, or Crocodiles, or Caymans, or… ”
“Why don’t you say alligator then ?
“Because you don’t get alligators in Africa. They are the form in the western lands. He likes them all, but particularly the crocodiles over there. He does vital research. He’s established a bond with a family group, from birth in some cases, so he has to go over frequently so they don’t disremember his scent.”
The boy was so uninterested it seemed foolish to doubt any more: “Oh. What sort of research ?”
“Nothing wrong.” the boy assured, “he just observes them, talks and even swims with them. He’s very brave, I’d be frightened.”
“Swims ?”
“Yeah,” not very interested, “apparently safe enough if they know you. I wouldn’t though.”
The visitor agreed it was amazing and the boy said without intonation that it took all sorts to make a world. On this deliberated trite note they parted amicably and the former went to find the Secretary.
Here he found Mr. Pooto was indeed away on holiday having forgotten his engagement, and no-one else could sign the requisition form for the purchase of eight scanners and twenty-four modems he had brought along as requested, at a special price for scholastic establishments that was only 35% higher than as sold in the high street, excluding an extended warranty on which the real profit was made, since the headmistress was off sick.
Disappointed he made an appointment to return a week later when the errant Pooto had returned, and took his leave making a weak ingratiating remark regarding his hope that Mr. Pooto would enjoy swimming with the crocodiles.
The School Secretary stared at him as if he was mad. “Not many crocs in Calais,” she ventured.
“Calais ? I thought he was in Africa.”
“What made you think that ? He nips over four times a year and brings back a wish-list of fags and booze for the staff-room. You needn’t spread it about, but he takes the school van.”
The visitor explaining, she observed that not all the children stuck to the unvarnished truth, and advised him not to stop to chat to any of the girls if they indicated they needed his help: only from idle interest did she ask what the boy looked like, although she certainly wasn’t going to waste her time over the matter; it could have been any of a dozen lads, but she already felt quite sure.
Just now the little chap was returning to class, his errand fulfilled, glad he hadn’t spoilt it by adding Pooto covered himself with thick grease to ward off the cold, and meditating as to the strange ritual indulged by priests in ancient Egypt alongside and inside crocodiles, whom he should have thought would object like the dickens; he never had the faintest surprise or problem with the continuance of any ritual: the real puzzle was the first person to institute it. What impelled them, and why ? Much like most of the things in this ridiculous establishment.
Sedately he entered, reported and sat down. Miss Santos the teacher conveyed her appreciative smile from him, whom she especially liked, to the rest of the class and continued conducting them in Biology. He reciprocated this affection, but could not allow this to unfairly favour her teaching by giving it any more attention than any other class he was in. The most he could do was privately admit that she was a lady with more perception and good judgement than any woman he was ever likely to meet; and the fact of her added dreaminess helped in many ways: partially because she carried a torch for the late Rock Hudson and spent many hours meditating on the consequence of an instantaneous mutual attraction had she visited his home by chance in the 60s or 70s. She also, rarely for anyone in the teaching profession, had an extreme liking for children, which Jamie could only suppose was due to a mutated form of Stockholm Syndrome. Personally he wasn’t interested in most of his fellows.
Whilst her docile voice squeaked on about stamens, or it may have been gonads, he sat reading ‘The Year of the Horsetails’ under the desk’s cover.
***
The school had derived from an earlier establishment for the sons of clerks and artisans founded by Donald Wishart Hamilton, a revered Quaker merchant in the mid 19th century — approximately 1854, but then it had taken a lengthy battle with the parish worthies and the Bishop of the day before it was fully allowed to exist, not least since the latter was opposed not only to the British & Foreign School Society and, Hamilton’s co-religionist, it’s founder Lancaster, but to ‘Old Wicked Shifts’ earlier imposing state generosity to that scheme, and equally as much to the ragbag of a cabinet whose unparalleled stupor meant that his nephew was at present missing a limb in Scutari; and so had not begun to function until 1859 — and therefore bearing his honoured name. Another friend, in both senses of the word, Forster, was able to persuade him that it would function best under the auspices of the latter’s School Boards scheme: the local authority had taken over early in the 20th century, leading through various denominations to becoming a recognisedly superior comprehensive around 60 years later. The only trace of the past left in a singularly horrible building dating from 1964, which already with some hideous extensions worthy of Tate Modern, was soon to be replenished with some far worse additions, was a portrait of the illustrious, and unbelievably industrious, old chap beaming slyly a la Franklin but with rather more kindly pomposity and recognition of riches well-earned, placed in the slippery foyer as one entered the main ( glass, now replaced by a toughened variety after some bad incidents ) doors. Any distinctively Christian ethos had vanished in the rush to compassion and everything was now geared to universal love and tolerance. The old Friend would have been nauseated — not even that curious creed actively promotes self-abasement: or even the wholesale abandonment of all traditions — and he might not have recognised, although his business dealings had not been held in the highest regard by his comperes or even by what passed for any regulatory authority amongst the Victorians, a lax crew at the best of times, what precise value there was in MBA’s, for which some of the elite here were to be as nurtured as eagerly as for real degrees.
The author of ‘In Leathern Breeches’, not as modern pupils imagined, a discussion on a sexual stimulus or what they vaguely guessed TV announcerettes wore in the 17th century ( for some had no conception that a large number of inventions are in fact of a somewhat near date ) but a biography of George Fox — which according to legend had depressed Matthew Arnold, Algernon Swinburne and George Orwell at different times, but which Oscar Wilde had carried about in public for a whole two months from sheer perversity — had implemented his beliefs to the extent of, as very many persons of that piety did until at least WWI, wearing the same Civil War garb as his hero, though after some experiment choosing wool rather than leather; amassing an enormous fortune in ironmongery, especially export; and corresponding with John Bright on the twin subjects of the evils of war and the necessity of a free hand to the manufacturing interest in the conditions of factories and workplaces. It could not be denied that his pacifism was sincerely meant, and he had been one of a delegation to Lincoln — one of many many delegations, an untold number, to that unfortunate man: on subjects ranging from the request for consideration for the promise of a postal job in a town he had never wanted to hear of, to urgings to declare war on England or France, or wherever — to discuss the imperative of the War Between The States coming to an end instanter. ‘To prevent needless effusion further.’ he quoted, and which words were now affixed as a legend, black on gold, below the portrait of the mild and beneficent visage of this excellent old man; for this hatred of War was the only thing of his legacies so highly regarded by his inheritors in this scholastic state that it gained a total approval. So much so they revered him for his peace and pieces of wealth in a way he, in all charity, would have visited the True North Pole minus all breeches rather than reciprocate.
After reading all about him ( the School Prospectus felt that boasting of a Victorian foundation might imply it’s still steely resolve to inculcate the brilliant values of that era ), Jamie was less impressed, and the words were substituted for a while with an imitation legend formed from self-seal sticky metallic letters pasted over: ‘He Rode With Quantrill.’ below the Quaker worthy; but this stayed less than a few months since Nancy pointed it out to some of her friends, and one of these was conscientious. It was his first run-in with Authority.
‘It is impossible to evaluate the moral compass of George W. Bush without reference to James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’
Not only because of the theology involved, nor yet additionally because it is one of the most influential and greatest of Scots novels, explaining much about Knox’s corrupting legacy that sours that troubled land.
But because i wanted to say that.
The innate manic manichaism of the pressie’s inmost self does at least add an extra edge to the stern boredom of contemporary international politics: the particular wars may be strictly dumb, yet without war we are nothing; so at least he’s fulfilling at least one useful function: entertainment. Much like Arnold Bennet’s famous Denry Machin, ‘The Card‘, “he’s identified with the great cause of cheering us all up.” Future generations — if they retain the habit of reading — will consider the War on Terror much as the same as la Grande Peur, or previous American hysteria over bolshevism…
After the Russian Revolution, Americans based their ideas of Bolshevism on the sensational half-truths of newspaper reports and on the portrayals of Communist activity in films like Dangerous Hours… . In this picture, Russian infiltration of American industry was foiled by Lloyd Hughes. The political complexities were ludicrously simplified. Audiences were shown the most heinous crime of all time: the nationalization of women. This abominable act involved a number of extras on horseback rounding up women, throwing them into dungeons, and beating them.
Kevin Brownlow - The Parade’s Gone By
With all that to be said for Bush though — and I should quote Solzhenitsyn’s gnomic Russian saying that those who speak for the wolf should also speak against him, were it not for that fact that identifying Americans with lupines seems so terribly, terribly wrong, they being much the same as the stalwart, yet not immensurately daring, Slavs, as Mencken noted in the last century: ‘ …nearer to the Russians than any Europeans. Russia was not like Europe, but it was strangely like America. In the same way the Russians were like Americans. They, too, were naturally religious and confiding; they, too, were below the civilized average in intelligence; and they, too, believed in democracy, and were trying to give it a trial.‘ — the lack of character consequent to the Calvinist doctrine of the Elect — it makes men mere puppets in the end — shall finally condemn him as it condemned the deluded Wringham.
In the parish of Colmonel
By bloody Claverhouse I fell.
Who did command that I should die
For owning covenanted Presbytery.
My blood a witness still doth stand
‘Gainst all defections in this land.
Once upon a time there was a magnet, and in its close neighbourhood lived some steel filings. One day two or three little filings felt a sudden desire to go and visit the magnet, and they began to talk of what a pleasant thing it would be to do. Other filings near by overheard their conversation, and they, too, became infected with the same desire. Still others joined them, till at last all the filings began to discuss the matter, and more and more their vague desire grew into an impulse.
‘Why not go today ?’ said some of them: but others were of opinion that it would be better to wait till to-morrow. Meanwhile, without their having noticed it, they had been involuntarily moving nearer to the magnet, which lay there quite still, apparently taking no heed of them. And so they went on discussing, all the time insensibly drawing nearer to their neighbour; and the more they talked, the more they felt the impulse growing stronger, till the more impatient ones declared that they would go that day, whatever the the rest did. Some were heard to say that it was their duty to visit the magnet, and that they ought to have gone long ago. And, while they talked, they moved always nearer and nearer, without realising that they had moved. Then, at last, the impatient ones prevailed, and, with one irresistible impulse, the whole body cried out, ‘There is no use waiting. We will go to-day. We will go now. We will go at once.’ And then in one unanimous mass they were swept along, and in another moment were clinging fast to the magnet on every side. Then the magnet smiled — for the steel filings had no doubt at all but that they were paying that visit of their own free will.
