Men, Masturbation, & Monogamy

The Baby Boomer-led Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and '70s has had a deeply permeating, catastrophically debilitating impact on nearly all aspects of modern Western culture. Evidence of the societal detritus is everywhere, from the ever-escalating divorce rate, to the proliferation of condom-wearing instruction classes for preteens, to the ubiquity of ridiculously tawdry pop songs like the Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps” or Lady Gaga’s “Disco Stick” on the radio.

Even cultural conservatives, intent on sloughing off the egregious sleaze and slime that followed in the wake of the hippie era, are more often than not subsumed in its wretched and malodorous ejaculate ooze. A case-in-point of such ironic ideological influence can be discerned in the rhetoric of numerous well-meaning religious groups who have chosen to fixate on pornography, and to expose the supposedly devastating effects that porn-viewage allegedly has on the male psyche.

Indeed, to judge from these groups’ shrilly alarmist and hectoring tone, the very act of scrutinizing a sexy centerfold in Playboy, or thrilling to titular Debbie’s unique adventures in Dallas, is akin to taking a hit from a crystal meth pipe, or worse. Drugs only kill the body, after all; smut murders the soul. Eerily echoing the claims of various scoldy Dworkin-style feminists, neo-Fundamentalist seminar leaders insist that sexually-explicit material turns decent men into misogynistic beasts, causing them to view women as nothing more than objectified prey, fit for no activity more exalted than—ahem—stuffing and mounting.

For example, Catholic author Steve Wood of www.familylifecenter.net ominously warns of the “trigger effect” that results when guys become inveterate smuthounds. In short, they begin to feel that their lives should be one non-stop orgy: women exist only to satisfy their animal lusts. This mindset, in turn, proves to be “ruinous” to marriages—in some cases before they even begin! Wood goes so far as to recommend that young women find out early on if a potential mate has a porn addiction, in order to prevent future heartbreak. And ladies unfortunate enough to be saddled with smut-smitten husbands already have painful months and years of therapy ahead.

Wood mourns how extensively the pornographic mindset has afflicted today’s men, even those with strong religious convictions, all because of the “tsunami wave of cyberspace,” and the frightful deposits it leaves on our bitter shore: an ever-multiplying colony of wankoramic websites, all within the touch a finger or the stroke of a key. Psychological counseling, supplemented by prayer, is the only way to eventually be exorcised of one’s lustful proclivities, Wood avers. And counseling inevitably involves candidly discussing one’s sexual “issues” with a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist, presumably accompanied all the while by one’s (presumably scowling) wife.

Now I’m sure that Wood is a far better Catholic than I am, and I don’t doubt the purity of his intentions. That said, his prescriptions strike me as a near-certain recipe for disaster. Men with a tendency to lust in their hearts—which is to say, nearly all men who have ever lived—are in danger of being classed as porn-addicts if their carnal desires occasionally lead them to illicit pictorial sources for stimulation. I don’t condone such behavior, but forcing a “porn-addicted” husband to have to recount such moments of weakness before his wife or girlfriend seems an unduly humiliating punishment, one that only a vengeful sadist hopped up on extra-strength estrogen could think actually fits the crime.

This isn’t to say that indulgence in Internet porn-watching is a harmless activity for a married man, or that it’s advisable to use dirty pictures or raunchy images as inspiration to masturbation. But there is something unseemly, dare I say seedy, about being made to discuss your chronic onanism as a prerequisite to reclaiming your purity. It somehow savors of the very mindset it’s supposed to be replacing; moreover, it just seems prurient and appalling.

The fact is that—for better or for worse—men enjoy looking at attractive women posed sexily. There is no deep-seated psychological reason for this; it is strictly biological. Just as naturally—as in “natural law”—such desires ought not be indulged, particularly when one is married. Still, even the best, most decent and well-behaved men can’t always overcome their biological urges. Lust in one’s heart is a sin, of course, and sin is detestable, by definition…but mental infidelity isn’t the same thing as actual, physical adultery. Sin is sin, but distinctions must—and should—be drawn between what is bad and what is worse.

Previous ages understood such distinctions well enough. In the pre-'60s days, one mentioned such transgressions in the confessional booth (or a similar expiatory ritual with roughly the same function), not the therapist’s couch. One did one’s penance, and was done with it. A man certainly didn’t burden his wife with such embarrassing information, nor did his wife care to know about such things. Monogamy was affirmed, and all-too-human weakness was also acknowledged. People accepted reality, received the grace of forgiveness, and and went forward without having to dredge up hurts and resentments over solitary misdeeds committed under sheets and behind closed doors.

Today, however, even those who wish to restore Old School notions of chastity insist upon pathologizing normal and unavoidable drives and functions. Today’s chastity crusaders and coaches seem to think that men could become lust-free if they just prayed hard enough not to get hard so often. They hold our crass, hypersexualized culture responsible for men becoming afflicted with frequent, involuntary erections. And to be sure, our culture has become distressingly hostile towards decency and innocence. Pornography is much more mainstream, and more accessible, than it ever used to be. But porn isn’t what makes men sex maniacs—nature has constructed us this way.

And if nature is but the handmaiden of the divine, then it seems that God Himself put us together like this, for His own inscrutable reasons. But if God planted in us a hunger to screw every halfway decent-looking woman who crossed our path, he also created us with an instinctual psychological preference for monogamy. I wish I knew why he crossed our wires this way. I’d ask Him, but the Almighty, in my experience, is more reclusive than J. D. Salinger and Stanley Kubrick put together. He is an eccentric genius who rarely grants interviews. He compels and puzzles us with his brilliant but frequently troubling work, and only very occasionally drops any hints as to what it all means.

Sympathy for the Mean Girl

This past summer, Cameron Diaz starred in the somewhat fun but undeniably fluffy not-quite black comedy Bad Teacher. The most inspired aspect of that movie wasn't the rather pedestrian plot or the by now thoroughly tired raunchy tastelessness of the tone and content (we've had about a thousand too many third-rate Something About Mary-style uninspired cinematic gross-out cringe-fests in the last decade or so). Instead, what stayed with the viewer was the character played by Diaz herself: an utterly unadmirable, shallow, narcissistic, bad-tempered anti-heroine-- someone we're given every reason to hate, but with whom we end up sympathizing in spite of ourselves, since her endlessly deplorable actions end up seeming rather pitiful, instead of vicious; and because the total lack of sentimental pretense that accompanies her absolute absence of scruples lends her an odd but undeniable charm.

Diaz's character is reincarnated in only slightly different form in Young Adult, a much deeper, much darker comedy-drama from Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman—the writer/director team which brought the sleeper hit Juno to the screen in 2007. Here, the thoroughly Americanized Afrikaner Charlize Theron plays the lead, author and divorcee Mavis Gary. Mavis, a once-beautiful blonde now approaching middle age, is a woman who still puts on the haughty airs of a duchess, yet who lives like an unreconstructed slob. Every night she passes out drunk in her semi-fancy Minneapolis high-rise apartment; she wakes up, hung over, sometimes next to last night's date, sometimes alone, always surrounded by filth she never bothers to clean up. She spends most of her day watching crap daytime TV, eating junk food, and occasionally attempting to write a new "young adult" book for a Gossip Girl-like franchise, which has her employed as a ghost writer.

Yet Mavis is roused from her listless day-to-day torpor when she learns that her teenage sweetheart Buddy Slade, now happily married, has just given birth to a baby daughter. Convincing herself that Buddy can't really be happy in that "hick town" she left behind, she returns to Mercury, Minnesota, with the mission to wrest him away from the family life in which she's convinced he must feel stifled and imprisoned. Once there, Mavis meets and forms an unlikely friendship with Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), a former "theater fag" whose locker was next to Mavis's when they attended high school together, but whose existence was barely ever noted by her during those four years. Matt, it turns out, was brutally attacked by a group of jocks during his senior year and suffered disfiguring, lifelong injuries from that assault. (Once she sees the cane he carries, Mavis remembers Matt as "that hate-crime guy"; Matt laconically replies that once the media found out that he wasn't actually gay, but rather "just a fat dork who got his ass kicked," they ceased to care about his case.)

After downing a few drinks, Mavis opens up to Matt about her real reasons for being back in town. Matt is appalled, but also somewhat amused, by Mavis's announced scheme to seduce her ex-beau away from his wife and daughter. He sees, just as we do, that in addition to being morally untenable, Mavis's despicable ambitions don't even have the virtue of being inspired by authentic love. Instead, it is for entirely ego-driven reasons that Mavis seeks to destroy a blissful and intact family; she wants to feel desirable and successful again. She is painfully aware that her body is aging and her sex appeal won't linger too much longer; once her attractiveness to the opposite sex is gone, she fears she'll be alone for good.

It goes without saying that Mavis's plans don't work, that she is rejected and humilated, and finally left with the unshakable conviction (for she is not stupid) that her soul is rotten to the core, that she is a reprehensible, manipulative, borderline-sociopathic, alchoholic whore, that everyone despises her—or worse, pities her—and that she desperately needs to change, if she hopes ever to be happy again. The fact that we, the audience, know she richly deserves this misery, yet at the same time find ourselves feeling sorry for her, is a testament to the even-handed (one may say "fair and balanced") tone maintained throughout the film. Indeed, screenwriter Cody and and director Reitman never pander to the audience or attempt to disingenuously blunt the thorny edges of their wretched protagonist's personality, yet like Oswalt's cranky but good-hearted cripple, we find her appealing just the same, because her obvious vulnerability grabs our hearts, even as we witness her numerous heartless escapades.

Or maybe it's because she's just so damn pretty. Really, would we men give an ugly girl so many chances to shape up and change her evil ways? But then nature, and our hormones, have us in a bind. As Matt tells Mavis in a moment of unvarnished honesty, "Guys like me are born to love women like you, no matter what."

To its credit, Young Adult resists the simple "feelgood" ending. Mavis's monstrous ego keeps reasserting itself, and as the credits roll, we see that she still would rather live in her narcissistic delusions than become a better person. Her final redemption, thus, remains in some doubt. We hope, for her sake and for the sake of other people in her life, that Mavis will finally become "better than this," as one character implores, but in the end that somewhat forlorn hope is all that we have.

We have seen many male characters of Mavis's stripe in recent years, but Young Adult may be a sign that popular culture is finally moving into a decidedly post-feminist age, wherein women's mistakes and misdeeds aren't merely seen as the unfortunate by-products of their suffering under a supposed "patriarchy," but rather as stemming from men's and women's shared flawed nature as all-too human beasts. Alt-rightists of all stripes should welcome this trend, as it showcases yet another significant chink in the armor of the once iron-clad PC-orthodoxy of the postmodern Zeitgeist. But all filmgoers of any ideology who appreciate the portrayal of uncompromising truths about the human condition should love Young Adult, a somtimes hilarous, often painful, but ultimately lovely cinematic gem.

Over the Rainbow

As you read these words, O loyal AltRight reader, your humble correspondent dwells in a distant, exotic, and vibrant society (“vibrant” being the standard euphemism for “dangerous” these days). Yes, I find myself behind the Rainbow curtain, in the multicultural less-than paradise of South Africa, getting a fascinating sneak peek at what might just prove to be the future of the general Western world, should current political and demographic trends persist.

Three days ago, I endured a punishing 15-hour flight from Atlanta to Johannesburg, courtesy of a generous grant from The National Policy Institute, parent company to AlternativeRight.com. Having slept off one bitch of a case of jet lag, I am now rested and ready to take in and duly record the sights, sounds, and smells of the Rainbow Nation, in all of its perilous, many-hued, divergently-complexioned glory.

Needless to say, I intend to focus most of my attention upon the most prominent of the white stripes of that Rainbow, a group often overlooked these days now that their efforts at racial social engineering—that apparatus known as Apartheid—has been dismantled. Indeed, the purpose of my visit is to speak with numerous representatives of the Afrikaner people, and to observe, in some small way, how the former head honchos of this far-flung Republic have responded to nearly two decades of living under ANC (mis)rule. 

Of particular interest to me will be to spend some time in the mini-ethnostate of Orania, a burgeoning Afrikaner homeland of sorts, unassumingly nestled in the vast, desolate Western Cape—a tiny town that may yet prove to be hugely significant in years to come. Most Afrikaners, of course, don’t live in Orania, yet they all have a stake in Orania’s fate, as does the entire White West.

To subscribe to Radix, click here. To support Andy's journey behind the Rainbow Curtain, click here.

The Afrikaners—descendants of the Calvinist Dutch, French, and German settlers of the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th century, and the intrepid Voortrekkers of the 19th century—are in a uniquely tragic position in history. Seventeen years ago, they essentially sold their birthright, ceding political control to the Black majority in order to avoid a looming violent catastrophe. But handing over the reigns of power to the African National Congress has brought largely baleful results for all South Africans, Black and White, Boer and Brit, Zulu and Xhosa, Coloured and Indian.

Today, the Afrikaner finds himself under assault from many quarters. He dwells in a bitter human sea of violent crime, festering hate, and stinking corruption. Yet the Afrikaners are a tough, stubborn, and resourceful people. For all of the challenges they face, one gets the impression that they’ll manage to carve out a niche for themselves in the midst of this new (dis)order. If nothing else, the Afrikaner is a survivor.

It will be my thesis going forward that the Afrikaners’ uncertain present is a reflection of the White race’s likely future. Thus, their contemporary survival strategies may hold many an ace for us to keep in the dark days approaching. However one defines one’s own dissident Rightist perspective, be it racial, spiritual, civilizational, or some combination of the three, it behooves readers of this site to consider the case of this singular people—this White tribe of Africa—as they labor to make the difficult but necessary trek towards self-determination.

It is my pleasure and my privilege to be here, thousands of miles from my home, spending a fortnight among the Afrikaners in order to collect material for a journalistic piece I intend to write for Richard Spencer’s and Alex Kurtagic's new journal Radix. From what Richard tells me, Radix looks to be an ambitious, intellectually stimulating, hard-hitting and provocative undertaking. Like Alternative Right, it will dare to tackle subjects that, while still almost never mentioned in “acceptable” discourse or among “polite” society, are nevertheless increasingly difficult to ignore, given the political trajectory of our age, and the bitter fruit which continues to be born from our culture’s foolish embrace of illogical and insane ideologies.

If you, dear reader, could spare a buck or two (or more!) to keep this defiant, deeply necessary enterprise afloat—indeed, to expand our theater of operations to new projects similar to the one upon which I have embarked here—your generosity will be greatly rewarded.

Thanks for affording me this opportunity, and please keep me in your prayers!

To subscribe to Radix, click here. To support Andy's journey behind the Rainbow Curtain, click here.

Not So Epic, Really...

Like Anders Behring Breivik with a side order of gratiutious profanity, but without the mass murder or the effete Nordic beauty and literary pretensions, Emma West, the "epic tram lady," has become an instant folk hero to many on the Right.

I do understand the appeal, in a way. Whenever anyone shows nerve, guts, and fortitude, putting himself in possible danger in order to express a deeply-held conviction, whether with words or with guns and bombs, there is something to admire. It becomes even more tempting to champion such a person if he fiercely espouses a cause that one favors, a cause that constantly gets defamed and ridiculed by smarmy elites. Immigration restrictionists and multicult-skeptics are naturally tired of the abuse, the ad hominem character assaults, the patently illiberal threats to our livelihood and freedom that continually issue forth from our supposedly "liberal" betters, who for all their talk of highfalutin talk of "tolerance" really want nothing more than to shut us up, imprison us, take away our jobs, and brand us with a scarlet "R" to cast us from polite society, into the outer darkness of perpetual sensitivity training, where there is great wailing and gnashing of teeth.

So of course it's appealing to see someone not afraid of being called a "racist," someone scrappy, unbowed, and unintimidated, as young Miss West shows herself to be during her hostile exchange with fellow London tram-goers in the now famous video circulating across the internets. Yet while I don't want to join the usual suspects in tarring and feathering this woman as some uniquely evil specimen of hateful hatred, I can't join the chorus of support for her, either.

My reason for refraining from praising West comes from a similar place as when I rebuked the Breivik-bots who hip-hip-hurrayed for his slaughter of teenage "cultural Marxists" at a youth camp in Norway this past summer. Revolt against the ruling regime must take the form of principled opposition, if it is to be worth its salt. What this woman did was not a "hate crime," or any sort of crime, but it still wasn't decent behavior. Indeed, she went off on a profane, unprovoked tirade against a bunch of people who weren't bothering her. And she did this with her child, a sweet-faced little boy, sitting on her lap and gazing with heartbreaking childish non-judgmental stoicism at his mum's brazen oafishness.

Nor, methinks, is the comparison to the legendary "epic beard man" terribly apt. The EBM was getting bullied and threatened by a drunken young lout, and he defended himself honorably, hilariously kicking the crap out of the little punk who apparently mistook him for a typically gutless White coward.

The dubiously named ETL, on the other hand, was plainly the aggressor in the tram. She was the equivalent of the Black thug on the Seattle bus in this scenario. The passengers who made retort were simply verbally defending themselves against her abuse. Of course, one can agree with Miss West's point, that this group of non-English people shouldn't ever have been allowed to settle in England, that mass immigration is out of control, that England's political elites are attempting to displace its native population with servile exotics in order to prop up their vile and corrupt power structure, that Great Britian is, as she puts it, "fuck-all"... without resorting to needless abuse of random immigrants who happen to be sitting around you on a subway train.

I'm sure that many Alt-Right readers will hold me guilty of snobbery for declining to back the not-so-epic tram lady on principle. But again, I don't object to Miss West for being an unlettered prole. Some of my best friends are unlettered proles. (Well, not really, but you see my larger rhetorical point.) Rather, I dislike the fact that she acted like a mean, bitchy tramp. Graceless behavior is hardly the staple of the working classes; we all succumb to it, on occasion. Yet we all must, and can, do better.

Anatomy of a Postmodern Farce

There is a much quoted aphorism, attributed to Karl Marx, to the effect that history repeats itself: first as tragedy, the second time as farce.

I suppose this statement could be said to summarize the history of Marxism itself, which in its 20th-century economic and political form in the East played out as unbridled state-enforced ideological repression and violence, leading to the torture and murder of millions of people, while in its current 21st-century, "cultural" incarnation in the West it takes the (slightly) less unsightly form of Chaz Bono gyrating uninhibitedly before millions of people on TV's "Dancing With the Stars."

But setting aside his ironic, unintended prescience regarding the future course of the ideology he bequeathed to our unfortunate world, Marx is generally off the mark here. Sure, tragedies do sometimes beget farces. However, it more often seems the norm for contemporary farces to spring from similarly farcical events of the recent past. When history repeats itself, it usually does so, first and ever after, as farce. Yet with each repeat step of this pitiful process, the farcicality gets magnified to an increasingly ludicrious level, until one can only conclude that the entirety of the human race-- or at least 99 percent of it-- is utterly retarded.

Take the postmodern-day institution known as "sexual harassment," and its latest manifestation in the ongoing scandal swirling around GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain. For all of the sound and fury surrounding Cain's "Grope-gate," there's really not much going on here that we haven't witnessed before.

The notion of sexual harassment was first widely broadcast to the public via our cultural commissars way back in the day, when Anita Hill publically accused Clarence Thomas of inappropriately regaling her with hearwarming stories of pubic hair on Coke cans and porn stars named Long Dong Silver. Because Thomas was a conservative Supreme Court judicial candidate, and Hill wished to derail his nomination, the latter naturally became the darling of liberals across the country, who proclaimed their righteousness and solidarity with the oppressed by plastering their cars with "I Believe Anita Hill" bumper stickers.

However, when a certain left-leaning president was accused of much more nefariously lecherous, even violent, deeds by numerous female underlings and acquaintences just a few years later, we found out (surprse, surprise!) that liberals tend to care more about politics than principle. Thus, in the waning years of the nifty nineties, we were treated to the smelly spectacle of the Democrat party and its supporters eschewing all of their Anita Hill-era concerns and avidly whoring themselves out to big-pimpin' daddy Clinton. These same jokers who wanted Thomas's balding head on a platter for allegedly making tasteless jokes to a co-worker now insisted that we give the prez a pass for allegedly feeling up Kathleen Willey, exposing his penis to Paula Jones, and raping Juanita Broaddrick, since to do otherwise would mean letting the odious Newt Gingrich and the evil Republicans have a poltical victory.

So much for the lofty ideal of "speaking truth to power."

And now in November of 2011, with the unfolding accusations against Herman Cain, this farcical triptych comes full circle. Now that a conservative Republican presidential contender is in the crosshairs, the tiresome partisan hacks on both sides have once more switched seats. Fresh from turning their backs on inconvenient victims like Willey, Jones, Broaddrick, and others, the liberals have suddenly decided that it's time to start believing the women again. And "movement" conservatives--those who equate ideological victory with GOP dominance--can only reflexively stand in solidarity with Cain, no matter how much of a sleazy lech he appears to have been on numerous occasions, since to do otherwise would mean letting the odious Nancy Pelosi and the dirty Democrats have a political victory.

And there we have it. "Sexual harassment"--which in previous ages was simply known as ungallant, un-gentlemanly, scandalous, and loathsome behavior, reviled by all decent people--has in our ideologized era become a means of cynically advancing one's own cause and hyper-selectively attacking one's adversary. Leftist feminists are passionately in favor of prosecuting alleged harassers, as long as the accused is a "bad" conservative like Thomas or Cain and not a "good" lefty like Clinton or Ted Kennedy. Movement pseudo-conservatives, for their part, find it useful to believe certain accusers, like those of Clinton, while reflexively impugning the integrity of those who dare to say that one of "their" guys might have gotten indecently fresh or hand-sy with the ladies.

In short, it's little but a political shell game. An appalling, albeit intermittently amusing, farce: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Come As You Are

In his amusingly-titled article “Smells Like Dead Junkie,” Jim Goad, an iconoclastic icon if ever there was one, takes rhetorical dead aim at Kurt Cobain, the famously fame-hating rock star, heroin addict, and supposed voice of Generation X, who took literal dead aim at himself back on April 5, 1994, when the self-directed Shot Heard ’Round the Grunge World tore a massive hole through the Nirvana frontman’s peroxide-fringed head, knocking the life out of this lead screamer’s poetically plaintive blue eyes and caking the ceiling of the celebrated anti-celebrity’s Seattle mansion with his gorgeously tortured brains.

Much as I appreciate Goad’s scathing and inimitably witty invective in assailing the grisly and insufferable rock-journo-fueled Cobain personality cult, however, I find his overall assessment of the left-handed guitarist with the naively left-wing views a bit off the mark. Cobain’s über-politically correct “cultural Marxism,” as expressed in certain sections in his journal where he attacks White heterosexual males and promotes riot-grrl feminism and homosexuality ought not, I believe, unduly inform our understanding of his personality or music.

Cobain himself saw with clarity that he barely knew what he was talking about when he indulged in such rants, and in fact was aware that it amounted to little more than blowing off steam against people who annoyed him—namely, jerky jocks and mean, macho metalheads. He never took himself seriously enough to view himself as anything other than a lightweight on political or social matters.

One journal entry is quite telling on this score: “I like to have strong opinions with nothing to back them up with besides my primal sincerity,” Cobain wrote. “I like sincerity. I lack sincerity,” he added, demonstrating characteristically cutting self-awareness in undermining the very thing that would even lend him credibility in his own eyes. Cobain wasn’t a poseur when it came to self-loathing; one gets the sense, in fact, that this aspect of his personality was very real, indeed, primal.

Self-hatred is a brutally recurrent motif in the lyrics of Nirvana’s songs; it is, in fact, the thematic centerpiece of the now-legendary Nevermind album, whose release 20 years ago suddenly and shockingly changed the sound, look, and feel of hard-rock music, transforming it from a bombastic, flamboyant celebration of hedonist excess (think Poison, Motley Crue, White Lion, Whitesnake and other popular “Hair Metal” bands of the '80s and early '90s) into something darkly satirical, snarlingly bilious and emotionally raw.

By turns achingly sad, raucously angry, and chillingly nihilistic in tone, Nevermind reflects, perhaps consciously, the punk ethos of the similarly-named Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. Indeed, Cobain often seems to be channeling Johnny Rotten’s outrageously ironic authorial voice; his anthemic indictment of trendy conformity, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” brings to mind the Pistol’s “Pretty Vacant”; the famous couplet, “I feel stupid and contagious / Here we are now; entertain us!” gleefully attacks the entitlement-mentality of brainless and spoiled youth looking for the New Big Thing to celebrate together in their sheeplike herd.

Vaguely aware of, and dissatisfied with, his own shallowness, the speaker of this song ultimately doesn’t care: “I find it hard, it’s hard to find / Oh, well, whatever, never mind.” At moments like this, the listener becomes aware that Cobain has himself in mind as the object of his own contempt; he feels he cuts a ridiculous figure; his bid to embody the spirit of flaming youth only amounts to something as derivative and contrived as a deodorant spray cynically marketed to teens (the “Teen Spirit” of the title) for profit. Later, Cobain was to reflect, in this same jaded vein, “Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I’m bored and old.”

Other highlights of Nevermind include the bruisingly lacerating yet maddeningly catchy “Lithium,” told from the point of view of a drug-addled manic-depressive schizophrenic who can’t decide if he’s miserable or ecstatic:

I’m so happy, cuz today I found my friends in my head

I’m so ugly; that’s okay, cuz so are you…

I’m so lonely; that’s okay, I shaved my head, and I’m not sad.

Nevermind also included the hypnotic “Come As You Are,” whose folksy, friendly, and welcoming-sounding title is belied by lyrics which suggest mind-control and manipulation, and whose eerily prescient refrain: “Well I swear that I don’t have a gun / No, I don’t have a gun/ No, I don’t have a gun” which sounds more like a lie the more it is endlessly repeated, suggesting that coercion and violence may be in store for the object of the speaker’s attention.

But it’s when Nirvana goes totally low-fi, away from howling guitars and screaming vocals and into quiet ballad-land that the effects are perhaps most startling. The elegantly bleak “Something In the Way” depicts a homeless man’s daily activities with complete lack of sentimentality—this is miles away from the cloying and patronizing territory tread by most rock singers of the era on the then-trendy issue of homelessness (think Genesis’s “Another Day in Paradise” or Bruce Springsteen’s “Philadelphia”)—leaving us only with a flat, barren, cold, and lonely sense of detachment.

Even more striking is “Polly,” which tells of an abduction and rape in progress from the viewpoint of the perpetrator. Cobain couldn’t have been too much of a pre-emo emasculated male feminist, or he wouldn’t have had it in him to write this most politically incorrect of songs, where the speaker dryly taunts his victim, even as he’s violating her: “Polly wants a cracker / I think I should get off her first.” Ultimately, it seems that neither the criminal nor his captive are able to obtain any sense of pleasure or pain from their shared experience: “Polly says her back hurts / She’s just as bored as me.” Again, the listener is caught up short by the overall absence of emotion; the detachment, somehow, is much more devastatingly poignant than any heartfelt plea for justice, tolerance, or mercy would have been in its place.

Indeed, for all of Kurt’s occasional jibes at middle-American conservative values in his diaries, Nirvana’s music determinedly eschews any trace of social-consciousness, or preachy rah-rah “hooray for our side” indulgences in self-righteousness so often expressed by representatives of the trendy-Left cultural cognoscenti in their bitter disdain for the alleged backwardness of the Red State segment of the population. (See, inter alia, Green Day’s immensely irritating American Idiot.)Instead, “Nevermind” turns its rabid vitriol on its own likely audience, and then on itself. The speaker’s tone in all of these songs is consistently rude, abrasive, sardonic, world-weary, and cynical; if he ever affects sincerity, it’s all a façade masking either sinister motives or outright insanity. There is no call to action: all action, it seems, is futile and pointless—all ideologies ridiculous, morally bankrupt, and self-serving—every would-be leader corrupt to the core, the mass of the population little more than brain-dead zombies demanding to be entertained with “stupid and contagious” postmodern bread and circuses.

Cobain may have struck certain political postures in various minor and generally insignificant ways, but at his core he seems to have believed in very little. Nihilism, when truly embraced without compromise, is bound to bear bitter fruit. In Kurt’s case, it led to drug addiction, depression, and his eventual suicide. Apparently even his love for his baby daughter wasn’t enough to prevent Cobain from launching himself into oblivion. If he wasn’t going to stay alive for Frances Bean (now a grown and lovely young woman), he certainly wasn’t going to stick around for the sake of the fortune and fame he’d unwittingly attained.

Kurt’s nihilism was certainly a blight on his existence, leading to many bad choices and habits, and ultimately to his highly ignoble final act of self-extinguishment. Artistically speaking, however, it is the relentless dissatisfaction with all causes, creeds, and smelly little orthodoxies that lends an album like Nevermind both power and a sort of wild, unkempt integrity.

We all have to pass through darkness in order to get to the light. Cobain never made it through the darkness...but while immersed in it, he recorded its gloom and horror brilliantly and pitilessly. Nevermind has given many a lonely soul solace and comfort in the last two decades, simply by reminding them that they are not alone. However overrated Kurt himself might be—and I have little doubt that he would have substantially agreed with Goad’s assessment on this score—such an achievement ought not be undervalued, methinks.

Lively Dissent in the Sepulchral City

Editor's Note: To avoid subjecting AltRight readers to navel-gazing, I've resisted writing about the recent NPI conference in Washington, DC, “Towards a New Nationalism,” which I organized alongside my partner-in-thought-crime, Austin Saucier, and mentor Bill Regnery. I have also determined that it is, unfortunately, bootless and pointless to split hairs with the many left-wing groups that wrote about our gathering—from the Soros-ite liberals to the professional "anti-racists" and"anti-fascist" thugs. Uniting these disparate tribes is their shared tendency of, in lieu of analysis, pointing and stuttering (as Steve Sailer has termed it). They simply can't believe that White people were allowed to meet in the same room and seriously discuss the destiny of their race. Their spin, that the conference was filled with bitter, old dead-enders—a suggestion belied by the presenters on stage as well as the strong contingent of students and twenty-somethings—raises the question of why these concerend citizens would bother reporting on and fretting about some bedraggled equivalent of the Flat-Earth Society. The Left’s outrage at—and obvious fascination with—things like “Towards a New Nationalism” reveal the true state of affairs: We are the vanguard. They are the defenders, perhaps the last ones, of a crumbling liberal order (or in the case of the anti-fa, useful idiots of the Establishment, to borrow a phrase from one of their heroes.) 

I thank The Last Ditch for posting this report by Andy Nowicki; it is a website that was covering the alternative Right before it was cool. ~Richard Spencer

As a compulsive melancholic, I am often seized with sadness for reasons that don't always immediately, or ever, make themselves clear. During nearly the entire time I attended the National Policy Institute conference, "Towards a New Nationalism," in the United State's capital on the weekend of September 10-11, I found myself attacked by this ruthless, implacable monster, eating away at me from the inside of my gut with its poison-tipped fangs. I'm not sure whether my profound unease resulted from lack of sleep — I'd driven some distance to the conference and navigated downtown D.C., which I always find an exhausting and bewildering experience, before spending the night at a cheap motel inside the Beltway that had the vibe and appearance of a flophouse/youth hostel — or whether it was a psychic revulsion brought on by proximity to the marble monuments of the "sepulchral city" itself, which rightly or wrongly impress me as an obscenely self-important display of idolatrous futility.

Or possibly, the furious despair that assaulted my consciousness was simply my natural reaction to the thoroughly depressing state of affairs faced by the Western world today, a subject upon which each of the speakers at the conference expostulated with forceful vigor.

Of course, it must be said that the conference did represent a major victory by virtue of the fact that it actually happened. Unlike the last two scheduled American Renaissance affairs, which leftist goon squads succeeded in closing down by intimidating various hotel managements in the Washington area and Charlotte, the NPI conference proceeded exactly as planned, without a hitch, and on federal turf, no less! — in a ballroom in the Ronald Reagan and International Trade Center building on Pennsylvania Avenue. I'm told there were a couple of ragtag, malodorous protesters squatting on the sidewalk outside holding signs decrying "hate," but I didn't see them. Richard Spencer, the editor of Alternative Right and conference organizer, took special care to thank the staff of the building for holding out against the censorious proclivities of the "tolerant" Left, which would have liked to have prevented the conference from taking place.

With an insouciant grin, Spencer noted the grim irony of the circumstance. "The free market will not let us speak! We can only rely on socialism to articulate our views," he declared, referring to AR's recent difficulties getting a venue in privately owned facilities.

None of the speakers, save one, were of a particularly libertarian bent, and none, except one, spent much time holding statist machinations responsible for the blight of multiculturalism and the resultant balkanization of the once culturally homogenous West. Instead, the primary focus of the conference was mass immigration to Western nations, a phenomenon that, in tandem with low native birthrates, threatens to alter the demographic landscape of North America and Europe in the coming decades.

Spencer began with a reflection on Enoch Powell's famous 1969 "rivers of blood" speech, in which the British Tory MP forecast violent social clashes and possible future dispossession of the native British if the government kept importing Third World immigrants in such volume. Examining current and likely future demographic trends, Spencer declared that, in Great Britain and elsewhere, Powell had if anything been over-optimistic in his assessment.

"We are living through the catastrophe that Enoch Powell prophesied," Spencer said. "We need to find a way out of a nation that has already been transformed."

Many other luminaries of the "alternative Right" addressed the small but spirited audience and in much the same vein as Spencer, weighing in from various angles but all addressing the central issue of immigration, legal or illegal, as well as the much more controversial matter of race and "human biological diversity," or racial differences.

Blogger Keith Preston (www.attackthesystem.com), a self-described "anarchist nationalist," spoke of the phenomenon of white liberal political correctness — "totalitarian humanism" as he dubbed it, arrestingly — which perpetually hamstrings critics of multiculturalism by calling them "racist" and imposing draconian speech codes that render honest debate impossible. Of all of the speakers, only Preston noted that political correctness has tended to go hand in hand with a "deification of the state." He also remarked that Big Business and Big Government, far from being enemies, very often collude. Both tend to favor mass Third World immigration: the former wants cheap labor and the latter a means of extending its welfare-state bureaucracy.

Byron Roth, author of The Perils of Diversity, predicted that the United States would become 50 percent nonwhite in fifty years, and forecast a growing balkanization along racial lines. Jared Taylor — whose American Renaissance conference in Charlotte was canceled last year after totalitarian humanists harassed the management of the hotel where it was scheduled to take place — considered future prospects for opting out of the multicult gulag, remarking on what he called "the Orania model," a reference to the small, exclusively Afrikaner town in the Northern Cape of South Africa. Tomislav Sunic spoke of the difficulty of uniting all native-born Europeans in one movement, when those from various countries tend to squabble over petty and relatively insignificant issues. And Sam Dickson reflected on what he felt was the need for whites to eschew excessive individualism and adopt the community-oriented thinking that seems to come more naturally to people of other races.

Every one of those speakers made compelling points, but the highlight of the conference was the talk given by Alex Kurtagic, the co-editor of Alternative Right, editor of Wermod and Wermod publishing company, and author of the multiculturalist-hell dystopia Mister.

A sturdily built, bespectacled man whose dark eyes and pale features betray a mix of Slavic and Mediterranean ancestry (his mother is Spanish and his father Slovenian), Kurtagic spoke in a passionate, lightly accented voice about what could be called the artist's role in helping to effect a paradigm shift in the near future.

"Humans are rarely persuaded by facts," he insisted. In order to reach others, we should instead "think in terms of seduction and inspiration."

And how can we be properly "seductive" and "inspiring"? Kurtagic said the key was to "enjoy the struggle." Rather than get caught up in gloom-and-doom or give in to the temptation to rattle off "an endless litany of complaints," we ought to project ease, confidence, and grace.

"Defeatism is a prelude to defeat," he proclaimed. And while he acknowledged that it isn't always easy to "enjoy" the stress and strain that accompany being a thought-criminal, Kurtagic's recommendation was to view the experience as a kind of grand adventure.

As a confirmed pessimist with a depressive orientation, I took Kurtagic's message as a patient takes his medicine. After all, he is right. As bad as things are, there is no point in being miserable. It neither helps us nor harms our enemies to adopt such an outlook. Even if we are unable to turn the tide of "radical egalitarianism," or "totalitarian humanism," or "cultural Marxism," we might as well take pleasure in the fact that we know what we believe, and that we fight for what we know in our hearts is right.

***

After the conference ended, I took a few minutes to stroll through the streets of the sepulchral city in the gathering dusk. I felt pensive, yet for the moment strangely heartened. The White House, the Capitol, the Washington Monument, the Supreme Court, the Lincoln Memorial, the new ominously Asiatic-looking, imperiously scowling MLK statue — all of those landmarks signified to me a ruling class generally hostile to my interests and values. They were made of stone, and I was but flesh. They would fall to ruin long after my corpse rotted in the earth. But as long as I lived and breathed, I resolved, from that day forth I would enjoy the struggle against the principalities and powers of the infernal Zeitgeist. And great would be my reward.

The Scarlet Letter

Everyone who hopes for the best but fears the worst cannot escape finding himself afflicted with a rather jarring, almost schizophrenic sense of psychic discombobulation from time to time. One who has fully abandoned himself to pessimism, on the other hand, has no such problem; since he always expects the worst, he isn’t in the least shaken when bad things happen. But the persistence of hope can have a devastating impact upon a person’s psyche. Hope leads to mental dislocation, because it muddles one’s perceptions. Hope springs eternal, entirely of its own volition; one cannot choose to do without it, because—being a force of nature—it won’t be ignored. Hope causes a person to wonder if things really are as dire as they seem, even when they clearly are, since (as hope seductively whispers), “Surely it’s not that bad.”

Every epoch is haunted by ubiquitous sinister spirits which plague the minds of men. It is useless to pretend otherwise. An earnest assessment of human history will reveal that certain types of people have always been prone to a certain moral hysteria, a fear and loathing of “dangerous” ideas and behaviors that are viewed as posing a kind of unhygienic threat of contagion to all that is good and decent. These sort of men tend to make their influence felt in various ways; they are nothing if not persistent; their crusader spirit fires them to lobby for their cause mercilessly, and the squeaky wheel, as ever, is the one that gets the grease.

Of course, most people are not crusading busybodies. Instead, the mass of men are the sort who want to avoid trouble, whose first and enduring impulse is to “get along” with others. They are, in other words, conformists. This sort is quite willing to mouth the mandatory slogans and repeat the pseudo-sacred shibboleths of the Zeitgeist, since they know instinctively that doing so will help them avoid attracting the wrong kind of attention.

The typical conformist is certainly not a “bad” person, by any stretch; he is simply not a terribly bold or brave person. Everyone must pick his battles, but the conformist nearly always passes on this prospect. He is, in Burke’s dictum, the good man who allows evil to prevail by doing nothing to stop it.

But just how prevalent is the conformist class’s cowardice? And how totally ruthless are the crusaders whose routinely cow the conformists into docility? These questions provoke confusion in the mind of the nonconforming Zeitgeist-defier, the one discussed above, who hopes for the best but fears the worst. “Surely,” hope again seductively whispers in his ear, “it can’t be that bad.” There may be tons of cruel fanatics and legions of worthless cowards in the world, but after all isn’t reason still a force to be reckoned with? Don’t most people still see the wisdom of such qualities as moderation and restraint?

Hope, as always, springs eternal. But then reality intrudes, spoiling everything. 

*

***

*

What witches were to 17^th Century Salem and Communists were to 1950s America, so are “racists” and “homophobes” within the current dispensation. I put these names in quotes because they mean little in a definitional sense—they are, in fact, little more than slurs, terms by which outsiders are marginalized and held up for ridicule and contempt. But names can never hurt us; rather, it is the stigma attached to such odious labels that does us in. This holds particularly true if you happen not to be incredibly rich and require gainful employment in order to support yourself and your family.

I have two particular recent cases in mind which illustrate the fearsome persistence of social stigma, demonstrating the power it has to wreck careers and put livelihoods in peril. They are two examples out of possibly hundreds, to be sure, but they are illustrative of a general trend, which is but the latest manifestation of an age-old proclivity to shun, spit upon, and otherwise cruelly castigate those considered outside of the circle of social acceptability. 

*

***

*

The first recent case involves Frank Borzellieri, a colorful and outspoken NYC-born goombah gadfly.

A few years ago, this curly-haired spitfire had caused quite a stir for a number of articles he wrote for the Leader-Observer, all of which weighed in on various forbidden subjects regarding the biological reality of racial differences; Borzellieri asserted, inter alia, that Whites were on average more intelligent than Blacks and Hispanics, and that Blacks and Hispanics were more prone to violent crime than Whites. His style of writing, however, wasn’t dryly academic in tone; he didn’t display charts or graphs and discourse in a professorial manner; instead, he wrote satirically, with a tone of mischievous insouciance, like an edgier Dave Barry.

I recall meeting Borzellieri briefly at the 2004 American Renaissance conference, where he gave an amusing talk about his experiences with various community activists who wanted to shut him up and intimidate his publisher into ceasing to carry his columns. At the time, Borzellieri served on a Manhattan school board and worked as an adjunct professor of journalism at New York Community College. I asked him if, living in the Bronx as he did, he had a lot of students who were Black and Hispanic. He owned that he did, indeed. I asked if they ever complained about the content of his columns, and he indicated that it hadn’t become an issue with them. “I tell them, ‘diversity’ is good, so how about let’s have some diversity of thought!” he exclaimed.

From our brief conversation, I saw that this fiery, funny little guy probably had a superb rapport with his students, whatever race they were. His down-to-earth, no-nonsense manner, combined with a twinkly-eyed amiability and good humor, no doubt made him a fine teacher. I could easily see his kids immensely enjoying his company. (Truth be told, I rather envied this quality about him, being a teacher myself, but one with no such easy rapport with students, or with people in general, for that matter…)

In the intervening years, Borzellieri was able to advance in the educational establishment. Most recently, he’d been appointed principal of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic school in the Bronx. But then his past, apparently, caught up with him. After the school weathered a barrage of complaints from—who else?—“community activists,” for his controversial writings, Borzellieri was dismissed from his post in August.

Apparently, it was assumed that refraining from parroting rote multiculturalist dogma can only mean one is unfit for a position where one presides as administrator over an ethnically “diverse” population. I’m not sure what Borzellieri is doing with himself now, and I’m sure he has no memory of our abovementioned exchange a few years ago, but I wish him well. 

*

***

*

The charge of being a “racist” lands one in roughly the same position as Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, with a bold “R” on his chest for all to see, signifying his unworthiness to be a part of polite and civilized society. But when it comes to degrees of official ignominy, those tagged with the scarlet “H” of “homophobe” aren’t much better off today. Soon, in fact, their persona non grata status may well exceed that of the “racists,” if current trends are any indication.

On a purely aesthetic level, I personally find the “homophobe” slur even more risibly absurd. “Racism,” at least, actually used to sort of mean something—i.e., “unreasonably prejudice or malice towards members of a different race”—before it became an all-encompassing means of shaming ideological heretics and thus lost all definitional bearing in reality.

But “homophobia” has never been anything but an intellectually dishonest nonsense word whose sole purpose is to cast aspersions on anyone expressing dissent from mandated PC-norms regarding homosexuality. The -phobia suffix is in fact, completely inaccurate and misleading, even if one is trying in good faith to understand what makes some people dislike gays. Who actually fears the homo? What’s he going to do that’s so menacing? Will he break into your home at night and redecorate your kitchen? Hold you at gunpoint and give you a bad haircut? Tie you up, force your pupils open, and make you watch old black-and-white movies starring Bettie Davis until you wretch and beg for mercy?

Gays flatter themselves to think that we straights find them the least bit intimidating. The truth is, we simply tend to find gay sex gross. That’s all. Repulsion is not fear. If our disgust hurts your feelings, O noble queer brethren, please know we’re not trying to be rude, just honest.

*

***

*

In any case, the fact that “homophobia” is a term patently devoid of meaning didn’t stop Florida high-school history teacher Jerry Buell—a 22-year veteran in his field—from getting suspended from his post at Mount Dora High School last month for posting a comment on his Facebook page regarding New York legalizing gay marriage. Among other things, Buell said that the sight of two men kissing on the news made him want to throw up, and he likened sodomic unions to “cesspools.”

Someone somewhere anonymously complained—it is still unclear who this person was— and the Lake County school system responded by pulling Buell from his post and placing him in administrative duties. Later, Buell contended that he was “tossed into a blender” at a moment’s notice by administrators, simply for speaking his mind on his private social network page.

It is worth noting that no one ever complained about Buell’s actual behavior in the classroom towards gay students; his mere expression of his beliefs was enough to land him in hot water with his higher-ups. The man obviously has strong religiously informed conservative opinions, but then so does a large portion of the citizenry; indeed, if everyone who shared Jerry Buell’s disgust at the sight of two dudes in lip-lock were forced out of his job, the unemployment rate would skyrocket to previously unheard of proportions.

Buell’s story, however, has a happier ending than Borzellieri’s. He has became a cause célèbre of the religious right, and even won an endorsement from the left-leaning ACLU. Following a two-week suspension, the Lake County school board has allowed Buell to return to his classroom, albeit somewhat grudgingly, and now the superintendent has moved on…to giving him grief for mentioning Jesus Christ on his class syllabi. 

Personally, I hope he writes a book about his ordeal, makes a ton of money, and tells the worthless bureaucrats who dicked him around to go sodomize themselves in Hell. That’s what I would do, anyway. But something tells me that Buell will stick with teaching; like Borzellieri, it seems, this recently elected “teacher of the year” truly enjoys the company of his students.

*

***

*

In the wake of cases like Borzellieri and Buell, a dark question lingers ominously: how many more will be threatened with dismissal from our professions for the offense of expressing un-kosher opinions in our private time? How safe are any of us confessed and incorrigible thought-criminals, really? How stout are our supposed allies, who may not agree with us, but think we should have the right to say what we speak out without forfeiting our ability to feed ourselves and our families?

Hope springs eternal: surely, it’s not that bad, we reflect. We tell ourselves that people don’t really like the type of heavy-handed, ideological browbeating on display in cases like this, that even liberals are discomfited by such grinding totalitarian tendencies found among some in their own ranks.

But… we can never be sure. We hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and try to find a way to behave prudently without lapsing into obsequious cravenness, to be bold without being foolish. And we pray, if we feel so inclined, as we wait patiently for the guillotine blade to drop on our necks. Whatever will be, will be.

Southern, White, Religious, and Racist

In the middle of a summer in which Black flash mobs have ambushed and terrorize unsuspecting Caucasians at public events and a mulatto President speaks placating words to militantly racist Mestizos intent on reclaiming “Aztlan” from the gringos, it just figures that the heartwarming, inspirational and “relevant” new family film is about the abiding cruel perfidy of…White Southerners!

But then some things never change, at least not among the image-makers and opinion-shapers of Hollywood, where simplistic segregation-era morality plays featuring murderously mean-faced rednecks and saintly, martyred magic Negros are forever de rigueur. From To Kill a Mockingbird through Mississippi Burning and now The Help, with several lesser productions in between, we can chart the history of this singularly monotonous cinematic trend. Movies of this genre are typically as shorn of nuance as any Goebbels-approved Nazi propaganda film, except with the exact opposite racial message. Still, the aim is identical: to fill the viewer with righteous indignation against the enemies of the Zeitgeist, who also just happen to be enemies of the state.

If our Hollywood masters are eager to draw our attention away from the messy and miserable failure of present-day multiculturalism for favor of a smarmily black-and-white portrayal of a past supposedly rife with White racism, these same cultural commissars seem oddly fixated on the once prevalent, now thoroughly exorcised, bugaboo of sexual repression. Contemporary Western pop culture is endlessly saturated with sexy pop songs, sexy music videos, sexy TV shows, sexy movies, sexy magazines, and sexy books (for those few still functionally literate); try as you might, you pretty much can’t escape the sight of leggy, buxom starlets miming fellatio while drunkenly exposing their bare crotches, or the sound of mind-numbingly raunchy dance anthems in which the singer orgasmically celebrates his or her unapologetically libertine lifestyle, or the sight and sound of gleefully fornicating teenagers in the latest “provocative” reality show or “hilarious” sex comedy. Yet for all that, moviemakers still apparently felt the need to remake Footloose, a movie which even in the '80s seemed to belong in some kind of weird Twilight Zone America located in an alternate universe.

In the America of Footloose, a nebulously “Christian” Wahhabi-style fundamentalist organized religion holds sway over American culture to such a degree that the poor kids in the hick town where the movie takes place aren’t even allowed to have a school dance! (cue a gasping, dying Kurtz: “The horror! The horror!”) This state of affairs is due, naturally, to the oppressive influence of the stodgy old City Council, who take their cue from the town’s holy-rolling preacher-man, who sees rock music as demonic and dancing as a lewd expression of forbidden sexuality. Even the local cops get in on the act; when cool newcomer Kevin Bacon plays Quiet Riot too loud on his car stereo, some mean ol’ boy in blue pulls him over, pulls out his cassette tape, and slaps him across the chin with it. (This humiliating brush with police brutality later prompts Bacon’s character to smoke, drink, and do a bunch of vengeful pirouetting in an abandoned warehouse while a generic '80s song plays over the soundtrack—a scene of epic, iconic silliness.)

Eventually, of course, Bacon’s character leads the kids at the school—all of whom look like they’re at least in their mid-'20s— in a righteous rebellion against the forces of adult oppression, repression, and suppression of libidinous youth. The requisitely hot n’ wild daughter of the preacher-man rebukes her dad for having his head in the sand, memorably screaming “I’m not even a virgin!” at him in a moment cued to provoke audience oohs, ahhs, and applause. The preacher-man eventually sees the light, learns that he must give way to flaming youth, who then go forth to dance an expertly choreographed number in the gymnasium when their savior Kevin Bacon arrives late, slides in on his knees, and mandates that the pseudo-teenage booty-shaking begin. Cue Kenny Loggins, fresh from scoring the theme song to Caddyshack, yet another movie which had the courage to bash conservative, religious repression in an age where it barely existed. “Kick off your Sunday shoes,” indeed. 

Judging from the trailer for the new Footloose, we’re going to get much of the same, with a few more Black faces, and a touch more hip-hop-derived dirty dancing. The heroine appears to be a Miley Cyrus-lookalike with an attitude, the hero another blandly handsome white boy with the dance moves of a ‘gro and pluck and gumption to take on those all-powerful Christian fundies who so rule this America that isn’t.

Yet the propagandizing, while still trite and ridiculous, could have been worse. We might have been treated to an interracial romance, or a gay romance, or an interspecies romance, or an intergenerational romance, among the two leads. I guess one of those scenarios will have to wait for the next remake of Footloose, in the early 2040s.

Or perhaps the corrupt, debased, and debauched Hollywood system will have died a horrible death by that time, and America will be ruled by new masters with a different agenda to promote. We’ll just have to wait and see.

The Politics of Nihilism

Some occurrences have a touch of unreality about them. They seem so unlikely that an alternative explanation must be in order. Indeed, last week’s Oslo massacre has many speculating about a vast conspiracy of some sort orchestrated by a shadowy, all-powerful cabal to manipulate world opinion in some nefarious manner.

Yet the simplest explanation of events—however seemingly outlandish—is usually the parsimonious one. Thus, it appears that Anders Behring Breivik—this preening 32-year-old Nordic pretty boy with a narcissistic proclivity to photograph himself playing dress-up—really did commit one of the worst atrocities in recent Scandinavian history all by his lonesome.

In fact, it seems that blond, baby-faced Breivik, who spent the last few months preparing a rambling online manifesto, which reaches new levels of sheer plodding length and mind-numbing tedium, is both the sole bomb-maker and lone gunman in the bloody affair that left nearly 100 people dead at or near the Norwegian capital over the course of a few horrific hours of carnage and terror last Friday. He alone, without assistance, built and detonated the car bomb that killed seven people in downtown Oslo. Then, rather more notoriously, he alone machine-gunned scores of defenseless high school and college-aged kids on the island of Utoya, where he posed as a security guard, won their trust and pretended to be their protector before ruthlessly massacring them.

The brutality of these crimes is breathtaking, as is the remorseless efficiency with which they were carried out by a man with a single-minded determination to shed as much blood as possible. It’s the sort of event that deserves at least a moment of reverential regard, a doffing of one’s cap or lowering of one’s flag, if you will. Yet Breivik had barely surrendered to police, and his victim’s screams still echoed in the air when people started to chatter, not about the immense evil of the act itself, but of the possible fallout of the rampage. The blood was still fresh on the ground, the bodies not yet carted away, and already the Oslo massacre was being scrutinized, by representatives of both Left and Right-leaning organizations, with an eye towards gaining political advantage.

Early suspicions were that the attacks had been carried out by radical Islamists, a scenario which had various far-rightists salivating, anticipating a tragedy to exploit to further their crusades against mass Third World immigration. But then it turned out that the perpetrator of the killing spree was a kind of Calvin Klein-model version of Timothy McVeigh, a man with the homicidal proclivities of a Dylan Klebold accompanied by the politics of Geert Wilders, together with the metrosexual photogenicity of a Ralph Fiennes. At which point, of course, the lefties pounced, and their shameless efforts to tar and feather their opposition with complicity in mass murder continues unabated.

In the wake of such irresponsible rhetoric, I think one point needs to be expressed loudly and strongly: there is no greater poverty of spirit than one which adopts a partisan mindset towards human atrocities. The killing of a hundred innocent civilians must be viewed with horror, even if we happen to like the political mindset of their murderer and despise the general outlook of those murdered. And yes, mass murder of likely “cultural Marxists” and “multicultural elitists” is still mass murder. To see things otherwise is to forfeit our humanity. They Live may be an inspired little B-movie, but in real life, our opponents aren’t sinister, bloodsucking aliens posing as humans; they don’t merit indiscriminate slaughter.

And while it is fine to ponder the likely political ramifications—both in Europe and elsewhere—of Breivik’s highly impolitic behavior, we must not let a crime like this become a political symbol of any kind. People commit unspeakable acts for a whole host of reasons: sometimes personal, sometimes political, sometimes as an expression of nihilistic rage and hopelessness. But in every case, their crimes are not ultimately reducible to any particular ideology or mindset; their depredations are, instead, deeply repugnant manifestations of human depravity, of a dark, vicious force within which tempts us to dehumanize our fellow man, and indulge in orgiastic, cathartic violence against others.

Many on the Left will attempt to construe Breivik as, in some way, representative of the typical right-wing, nationalistic, immigration-restrictionist voter; it’s a slippery slope, they’ll argue, between opposing mass immigration and spraying a bunch of terrified teenagers with machine gun fire. Such an argument is obviously specious as well as being outrageously disingenuous. Then again, many right-wingers would have employed a similarly logically fallacious guilt-by-association strategy if the Oslo killer had been a radical Muslim. In fact, even if it’s true that open immigration is a pernicious and failed policy, the story of one homicidal Islamist on a rampage doesn’t amount to an argument in itself.

Many thousands of devout Muslim immigrants live peaceably in Europe today. Even if we believe that their continued presence is ultimately untenable, it won’t do to define this entire population by the very worst of their lot.

Finally, AltRightists really need to stop moaning and groaning about how things are really going to get bad for us now. In the first place, such reflexive alarmism is annoyingly whiny. In the second place, it is thoroughly misguided. The attempt of the Left to smear all Rightists as genocidal Breiviks-in-training will fail. It’s rhetorically quite weak. Breivik is, after all, just one man, and his actions are too extreme to be viewed as representative of anyone but himself.

But more importantly, dwelling so hard on the consequences of Breivik’s depredations, while paying mere lip service to his bloody deeds, does an injustice to the enormity of his crimes. It is undignified, unmanly, and crass. The real story isn’t the fallout of the massacre, it is the massacre itself. All people of good will, of every political stripe—including the alternative Right—should acknowledge the events of Friday, July 22 as a shattering human tragedy, nothing more, nothing less. Some things are—or at least ought to be—beyond politics.

Libido of the Ugly

While often taken for a nihilist, I am no atheist. And even if I were inclined towards upholding theological nullification, I would hold no candle for the likes of Richard Dawkins, who, in his non-scientific writings, strikes me not as a thoughtful doubter but a smug, arrogant egotist more concerned with self-promotion and the attainment of cult-of-personality status than the disinterested pursuit of truth for its own sake.

Given his unlikeable personality, and some generally loathsome propensities, I find myself thoroughly surprised at my current desire to defend Dawkins against those of his own camp who have turned against him in an ideologically-driven snit recently. But then, an overarching concern with opposing the Zeitgeist’s smelly little orthodoxies at every turn can make for strange bedfellows sometimes.

I suppose, however, that it isn’t really Dawkins with whom I sympathize in this silly little controversy involving a silly little feminist blogger and her hapless, dorky would-be elevator-wooer in the aftermath of what was certainly a silly little atheist conference filled with hapless and dorky attendees in Dublin last month. I’ll certainly roll my eyes if Dawkins bows to pressure and perpetrates a Tracy Morgan-esque craven apology for being such a wretched “sexist,” or whatever they’re saying he is. But ultimately, it’s none of my concern what Dawkins does, or doesn’t do. However he elects to respond, verily, he has his reward.

No, for me the truly galling aspect of the “elevator-gate” pseudo-scandal only becomes apparent when one reads between the lines, and considers what is being said and left unsaid in the reportage of what should have been a non-event.

*

***

*

As we all know by now, “Skepchick,” a young, bespectacled, sour-faced female-supremacist, was invited to speak at the World Atheist Convention, a godless gathering at a hotel in Dublin, Ireland. (Goddess only knows why she was invited, and I’m frankly uninterested in speculating; I’ve never claimed to understand the rhetorical tastes of atheists, feminists, or atheist-feminists.) After her speech, at 4 a.m., whilst taking the elevator up to her room, Skeptical-chicky was awkwardly propositioned by a man she apparently regarded as an unappealing nerd. She turned down his advances, and he meekly relented, in good beta-male fashion, exited the elevator, and slunk away to his room for a heavy date with his right hand.

Spoiled, bitchy womanist princess puts horny, harmless dork in his place.

End of story, right?

Wrong.

In fact, Skepchick, seething over this pre-rape hostile-environment trauma she was forced to endure on the lift, elected to blog about it later, where she huffed about suffering the indignity of being “sexualized.” Poor thing! Richard Dawkins responded to this childishness with haughty mockery, and then found himself under fire for his display of ungallant chauvinism, or something. And Skep-chickypoo added fuel to the fire by calling Dawkins a “privileged” White Male Sexist Dog, or words to that effect.

So the matter stands. Whatever. If feminists want to complain about being sexualized, I guess they can knock themselves out. Reasonable people will find their complaints tiresome and stupid. If someone “sexualizes” you, that means, in plain English, that he finds you attractive, right? Why would this possibly be taken as anything other than a compliment? Moreover, the man in the elevator wasn’t annoyingly persistent, nor threatening. Save for his unsavory overtures, he seems to have behaved like a perfect gentleman (albeit of the nerdy variety). Only a thoroughly ideologized feminist could manage to find menace in such a circumstance.

But therein, I suspect, lies the rub. Clearly our Skepchick was annoyed because she found her interlocutor unattractive. One wonders how she would have reacted if some atheist stud of Brad Pitt or Matt Damon-esque handsomeness had asked to attend her to her Skepchicky suite for a nightcap. One gathers that she may have had rather a different reaction if she’d regarded her potential suitor as a hot piece of man-meat. She probably would at least have blushed and giggled, while running a finger through her hair and coyly biting her lower lip, instead of rolling her eyes and stomping her feet with furious annoyance at the awful impertinence of his behavior. Whether she’d take him up on his proposal, I don’t pretend to know, but I will go so far as to surmise that she almost certainly wouldn’t bitch about the incident later on her blog, or treat the man’s proposition as rape-waiting-to-happen, or symbolic rape, or other such ideological rot.

*
***
*

Several years ago, I remember watching Chris Rock weigh in on the then-topical Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. If Justice Thomas had resembled Denzel Washington, Rock opined, Ms. Hill would never have complained about anything. Expanding this observation into a broader context, the caustic comedian declared that “sexual harassment” is often just, as Rock put it, “when ugly guys try to get some.” When women dislike the attention, as they are more likely to do when they find the man unattractive, they are more likely to claim to have been harassed or improperly “sexualized.”

Thus, it would seem that the gravest societal victims of this malignant strain of radical feminism represented by “Skepchick” are average or below-average looking men. In addition to having been denied the physical blessings given to the handsomer of the male species, they are now commonly regarded with self-righteous rage as piggish harassers and potential rapists if they ever decide to be bold with the ladies.

Think about it: Has Skepchick ever apologized to the poor guy she insulted and impugned on her blog? Has anyone even asked her to do so? She was perfectly within her rights to reject him, but how sporting is it, really, to hold him up for sanctimonious ridicule in the aftermath of spurning his feeble advances?

As anyone who regards my mugshot below might guess—yes, as a below-average looking man, I do rather take offense at this seldom-mentioned double standard. It’s high time someone stands up for the ugly guy.

Stepchick, we’ve got your kind outnumbered. We are prouder and more powerful than you think. We refuse to apologize for our existence. We’re here, we’re ugly, we have sex drives, we sometimes hit on women out of our league. Get used to it.

The "Gay Marriage" Zeitgeist

The issue of gay “marriage”—so perpetually in the news these days—in itself little concerns me. I find the very notion grotesquely absurd, but then it’s really no skin off my reactionary Catholic nose if men want to live with other men or women with other women in arrangements that they consider to be, in some warped way, “matrimonial.”

I am, of course, troubled by certain patently totalitarian aspects of the homo matrimonio crusade, which I have already discussed at length, but I’ve really got no serious beef with gays who seek only to “live and let live,” and don’t intend to harass the rest of the world into acceptance or approval of their behavior. I’m far too much of a solitary-dwelling, crusty-crabbed curmudgeon to get the least bit exercised over what other people are doing with their genitalia. I don’t really want to know—I won’t ask, so please don’t tell. But in the privacy of your homes, or bathhouses…whatever, man. Just keep it far away from me.

There is, however, something in the agitation for the normalization of homosexuality that is deeply galling to my sensibilities, even without considering the patently totalitarian “We will bury you”-style legal threats raining down on dating services, bed and breakfasts, and religious denominations who decline to cater to the demands of the queer lobby. Something in all of the sound and fury reminds me of why I broke with liberalism in the first place, and why I remain an angry ex-liberal to his day.

Put simply, the gay marriage-movement is symptomatic of a general tendency within the modern Left that I have long despised; the manufacture of the “marriage equality” controversy in itself demonstrates the essential spiritual emptiness of liberalism, as well as the flighty, facile, abjectly conformist nature of most liberals.

*

***
*

Liberalism, as currently constituted, is essentially little more than a social clique. One adopts a liberal mindset in order to prove himself worthy, so all of the “cool” people will like him, invite him to their parties, and thus improve his overall social standing. Put that way, liberalism is just so damn high school-esque it’s plainly pathetic.

But if liberalism is overly concerned with status, it is also militantly and determinedly sycophantic in orientation. Being liberal, far more often than not these days, is all about proving oneself fashionable; like a nervous pledge to a storied fraternity of exquisite allure, the liberal tends to be obsessed with fitting in, and eager to say the right things to the right people. If he sufficiently impresses the “in” crowd and in shows himself to be a reliable follower of the party line, he won’t ever have to suffer the mortifying shame of getting shunned.

Since the pomo liberal has dispensed with God and any sort of transcendental law, his human drive toward reverence of the sacred has been misplaced; being predisposed towards the hive mind of his clique, he worships whatever is trendy. Usually, the trendy thing is The Other: minorities, immigrants, supposed historical victims of the Big Bad White West. I recall, back in the ‘90s, when feminism seemed to be the ruling ideology of the cultural Left; back then, it seemed everyone was listening to Sarah McLachlin and Natalie Merchant and talking angrily about rape, sexual harassment, misogyny, and the multifarious depredations of the perfidious “patriarchy.” If you called a woman a “girl” back then…well, Goddess help you! Your fate would likely be worse than Nicolas Cage’s was at the end of The Wicker Man.

Today, though feminism hasn’t disappeared, people seem more mellow and copacetic on these matters (in America, anyway—Sweden, appears to be a different issue entirely). A man can probably get away with calling a woman a “girl” in 2011 without having some broad-shouldered, crew-cut harridan smack him in the groin with her man-purse; he’s smiled on, rather than being glowered at, when he holds a door open for a lady; what’s more, jocular observations about gender differences are considered entirely kosher fodder for late-night comedians and sociologists alike.

Priorities have shifted: today, instead of being all about the gals, it’s all about the gays.

Twenty years ago, no one, not even the most strident of gay activists, was demanding gay “marriage.” In fact, back then, the trend among liberals back then was still to see the entire institution of marriage as unimportant, a mere “piece of paper” from a bureaucrat, which signified nothing. Gays didn’t need marriage back then in order to feel “affirmed”; they merely had “longtime companions,” and that was enough.

But at some point, for some reason, someone high up in the liberal clique decided that the time had come to extend marriage benefits to pomo homos. They determined that it was, yes, “discriminatory,” to tell a man he couldn’t get a piece of paper from the county courthouse to show that he was committed to his “longtime companion.”

Once this new party-line was decided upon, all of the rank and file of the clique—those jostling for social position, ever desirous of proving their ideological bone fides—fell into line like meek little sheep. I remember watching some episode of a talk show a few years ago, wherein aging sexpot Jacqueline Bisset was asked what she thought about the notion of gay marriage. She pouted her luscious lips for a quick moment, then shrugged and said, “Well, why not?”

Why not, indeed? If it’s what the cool, hip, glamorous people like Jon Stewart, Brad Pitt, and Lady Gaga want, then you’d be a fool to oppose it. Why court the disdain of the high-born and well-placed? If all the sexy cheerleaders and the cute preppy guys who rule the high school of liberalism are in favor of gay marriage, what in the world do you have to gain by speaking out against it, you pimply-faced dork? You’d better toe the party line, if you don’t want to become persona non-grata…

*

* * *

*

My own reasons for opposing gay marriage aren’t superficial or rooted in unthinking bigotry towards the differently-sexed. And they aren’t in any way related to “homophobia,” whatever the hell that exceedingly tired word was ever supposed to mean… But even if I didn’t have moral qualms about suddenly redefining a thousands-year old institution out of deference to a capricious Zeitgeist, I suspect I’d feel the same compulsion to jeer and flout at the acolytes at the altar of this latest Big Important Cause, just because the degree of such creepily craven adherence to trends just screams out to be mercilessly mocked.

The Trump Card

Tracy Morgan has declined to take my advice and fight his totalitarian-minded persecutors, and like a post-modern day Winston Smith, he appears perfectly content to declare his unabashed love for Big Gay Brother.

This is disappointing, but not at all unexpected. The desire to conform seems to run deep, especially among those who have become rich, famous, and successful. Once you’ve ascended to the mountaintop of such glorious adulation, it’s apparently hard to imagine doing without all the perks you’ve acquired in the process.

So Tracy has returned to Nashville, the scene of last week’s verbal transgressions, and put on his best Stepin Fetchit routine for the scowlingly butch and prissily effeminate bullies of GLAAD, as well as their legions of sodomic minions and “straight, but not narrow” fellow travelers. The grotesque absurdity of the entire spectacle can hardly be overstated; the dehumanizing degradation which suffuses Morgan’s Nashville repentance tour is as rank as the wicked atmosphere which no doubt permeated Tennessee slave markets during the antebellum era. Morgan is getting “owned” in the very region of the country where his ancestors were bought and sold years ago; only the masters, and the terms of ownership, have changed.

And who actually thinks Morgan has had a sincere change of heart in the few days between his rhetorical malefactions and his current fawning pleas for forgiveness? Those present for his willing self-emasculation surely know that, in his heart of hearts, Morgan must still feel the same disgust for homosexuality that he ever did before. Just the same, the reps of GLAAD must savor the power of knowing they can break a man’s will and spirit and shred his dignity at a moment’s notice; they are surely smiling all the while like cruel slavemasters, giddily anticipating the next occasion to crack their whips across the backs of all those uppity homophobes who still dare to resist their rule.

*

* * * 

*

There are a couple of observations that it may be useful to make at this point, putting the entire sordid affaire d’Morgan in social context.

The first is this: Morgan’s initial “rant,” as it was called (whenever the media doesn’t like what someone says, they disingenuously label it a “rant”), was a fairly typical expression of the mindset of the American Black community in general. Most blacks aren’t liberal in any sense of the word. They vote Democrat in droves only for reasons of presumed self-interest, because they see it as tribally useful; only Whites of a SWPL-bent vote Democrat as part of an overall desire to feel good about themselves, in smitten self-congratulation over their supposed enlightened sense of “tolerance.” Non-Whites, Blacks included, don’t tend to fawn before the “other,” nor are they in the least interested in righting any supposed historical wrongs; that is exclusive SWPL territory. They are eagerly ethnocentric in mindset, and thoroughly culturally conservative in temperament.

I have a couple of anecdotal tales which help give credence to this point:  

1. The other day I was listening to NPR (yeah, I know; give me a break…I am White, after all), to that most SWPL of all game shows, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. The show regularly features a group of hip and witty guests weighing in on current issues; it is a kind of more cerebral version of Hollywood Squares or The Match Game. The time I tuned in, one of the guests had a conspicuously Negroid voice, which was unusual. This fellow had a harder time chiming in with clever rejoinders and repartee; I could tell he felt a bit out of place, an odd man out; I frankly felt a bit sorry for him. But when the host of the show shared a ridiculous story about an animal-rights group deciding that pets should hereafter be labeled “animal companions,” this man suddenly felt compelled to speak up. “I want my country back!” he declared vigorously, bristling with outrage over the priggish silliness of political correctness. Most studio audiences would have roared with applause at this sentiment, but the SWPLs in the studio audience only sat awkwardly; such populist, anti-liberal elitist rhetoric clearly didn’t sit well with them, even as expressed by the token Negro in their midst.
2. Another moment of clarity struck me when I recently witnessed a black comedian (someone considerably less famous than Tracy Morgan) go on an extended tear against all those fools who oppose corporal punishment, or as he called it, giving kids a good “whoopin’.” This time, the audience--being a more representative cross-section of America than the public radio snobs cited in the previous example--went readily along with him, sharing the scorn he heaped on the pie-in-the-sky notion that children can be “reasoned” into proper behavior.

Both of these instances highlight the underlying reality of Black American culture, one I think most AltRight readers can admire; in spite of the obvious problems which plague and bedevil the Black community today, the bulk of Blacks seem to have no sympathy with the mamby-pamby, scoldy, schoolmarm-like atmosphere of effete, contemporary collegiate liberal-leftism. Most Blacks, in fact, are strongly religious, anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality, anti-feminist, and pro-capital/corporal punishment. These views, for better or for worse on their own merits, are certainly signs of healthy defiance against the increasingly oppressive Zeitgeist which weighs down upon us all. That is to say, unlike Tracy Morgan, most Blacks today refuse to be slaves to the cultural commissars.

But another, more illuminating note might be sounded with regard to the significance of Morgan’s plight when we consider the hierarchy, if you will, of thought-criminality in the contemporary world. For there is clearly and unmistakably a pecking order which has emerged as far as persona-non-grata-ship is assigned to those who make the mistake of “ranting,” that is, expressing a negative opinion about a protected group.

The lowest of the low are, of course, straight White, Gentile males. Nothing could possibly rehabilitate the career of Mel Gibson, to cite the most conspicuous example. John Rocker, a Southern White male, took more grief than most serial killers ever have when he spoke his views regarding New York’s ethnic and sexual diversity a few years ago. Nor does being a Jew necessarily work in your favor, as raunchy comedian Andrew Dice Clay discovered when his act ran afoul of angry and powerful interest group agitators back in the '90s.

If straight Whites are the fairest of fair game, however, it is clear now that straight Blacks aren’t safe either, at least not when they insult gays. Blacks are prized highly by the liberal left for their presumed “victim” status, but not to the extent that homosexuals are; the love that at one time dared not speak its name (and now can’t seem to stop shouting it hysterically) seems to trump a high melanin count for immediate assessment of righteousness in the trendy-left multicult paradigm. A prominent homo who made pointed remarks about various negative Negroidal attributes would surely get off easier than Tracy Morgan has for speaking ill of the queers.

On the other hand, even being a fabulously flamboyant flamer has its limits. Just think of poor John Galliano’s ordeal earlier this year. Even the cred of being a famous and totally gay fashion designer was of no help to him, when, in a drunken snit during a heated verbal altercation, he shouted that he loved Hitler and told Jewish patrons of a restaurant that they ought to be gassed. No quarter has been shown for Galliano since this incident; he has been fired from his job, prosecuted for hate speech, and pelted with merciless scorn and invective.

What does this tell us? That being from a favored group is of no help if you make a sarcastic, flippant or tasteless comment about either of the two H’s: that is, Hitler and the Holocaust. It is here that we finally reach the outer edges of that perilous region known as “too far.” That this should be the spot where the forbidden meets the truly verboten should indeed give us pause.

The Gay Movement's Bitch

In my December 2010 piece "Ten Shocking Predictions," I foresaw, with uncanny, Nostradamus-like prescience, the current mess in which SNL alum and 30 Rock star Tracy Morgan now finds himself. I wrote:

I predict that someone famous will get in trouble for making allegedly racist or homophobic statements in some public or private venue in 2011, and will be forced to offer a humiliated apology for his supposed verbal malefactions. I further predict that said malefactions will NOT be forgiven by representatives of the dominant paradigm (which, by the way, will NOT be subverted) until he does further work to begin the 'healing process,' which he will immediately do forthwith, and that after he does them forthwith, the representatives of the dominant paradigm will CONTINUE to withhold forgiveness indefinitely.

It was a bold and stunning prediction, describing an occurrence we have very rarely witnessed in recent years, that of a celebrity being made to pathetically grovel before a powerful and favored special interest group for the sin of expressing a forbidden opinion, thus committing an unforgiveable transgression against the Holy Zeitgeist. We have rarely seen it, that is, with just a few minor exceptional cases, like those of Jimmy "the Greek" Synder, Andrew Dice Clay, Andy Rooney, John Rocker, Trent Lott, Reggie White, Mel Gibson, Helen Thomas, Rick Sanchez, Juan Williams, Rush Limbaugh, Lars Von Trier, and possibly a few hundred others who have run afoul of the PC thought police in these otherwise easygoing and totally un-censorious times. Yet against all odds, my prediction came true, demonstrating to all doubters once and for all the impressively virile extent of my formidable psychic powers.

Yes, it happened, unfolding just as I’d forecasted! During an appearance in Nashville last week, Tracy Morgan, the Black comedian whose shtick is to be a sassy, boorish loudmouth—to distinguish him from all of the elegant, tasteful, and restrained black comedians currently out there, I suppose—took his outrageous act to that perilous region known as “too far.”

Morgan made the mistake of complaining about gays who bitch about getting bullied (a similar complaint to one made by yours truly in these virtual pages; then again, yours truly isn't famous, so nobody cares). Morgan also apparently said he'd "stab" his son if he ever got wind that he was homosexual—a statement which, though probably made in jest, must be sternly condemned since, after all, some things are JUST NOT FUNNY. (Joking about sticking a knife in your heterosexual son, on the other hand, is no doubt perfectly cool, while declaring you'd stab your son if he ever expressed “homophobic” sentiments might just win you a medal for heroism and enlightened tolerance from the likes of GLAAD.)

Now Morgan has “learned his lesson,” but of course, and he is dutifully setting forth to right his wrong, returning to Nashville to cringe, grovel and GLAAD-hand his masters, like the slave that he is. He has even expressed his support for gay marriage.

I will never comprehend why people who are rich and famous still feel compelled to abase and humiliate themselves in this manner—if I had Morgan’s money and were in his predicament, I’d happily invite all those who want me to apologize to pucker up and kiss my skinny white ass. Heck, I’d assuredly do that now, poor, powerless, obscure paleocon pornographic scribbler though I am. Yet Tracy Morgan and his fellow celebs always seem to prefer the wretched route of the public mea culpa, which strikes me as not only degrading but foolish as well. When was the last time an apology for thought-crime ever won a thought-criminal any mercy from those who sit in judgment over him, with his fate in their hands? Apologizing just gives your enemies what they want; your desperate contrition makes them smile nastily, and start to circle you, their prey, with breathtaking relentlessness, like sharks swarming a bloody carcass in the ocean.

If you’re going to go down anyway, isn’t it better to go down swinging? Don’t let these bitches make you their nigger, Tracy! Fight like a man, for God’s sake!

The Morning After

Recently, White Nationalists have touted Metal—particularly Black Metal—as a uniquely Caucasoid sound, one which has the power to unearth the badass fury of proud, salt-of-the-earth, put-upon honky folk in an age of mounting multicultural tyranny and insufferably smarmy media-enforced White guilt.

These writers probably have a point, in a way. It seems to me, though, that what’s uncouth remains uncouth, whether it sports gold teeth, a Flava-Flav necklace-watch and sagging britches, or moon boots, a Def Leppard T-shirt and a mullet. That is to say, a nigger is a nigger, whether he’s Black or White.

Don’t get me wrong: I am well aware that it’s unfair to paint with too broad a brush. Not every fan of rap is a degenerate thug who lives to smoke crack and rape White girls, just as not every lover of loud guitar music is a drunken, violent lout who thrives on tormenting wimps, nerds, and fags for sport. Still, I’m not sure if I’d like to live in a world where the hip-hopper and the head-banger are the main competing forces. I thus question the wisdom of championing what seems to be one fairly skanky subculture to fight another assuredly trashy one. Indeed, if what one desires is the survival of civilization, this strikes me as a deeply wrongheaded strategy.

*
* * *

*

Heavy Metal put down its roots in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, but it really grew into a formidable cultural force during the ‘80s, when, in the form of “Hair Metal,” it came to represent the primary rival of a radically different, yet equally “White” style of popular music: that is, the interlacing and overlapping genres of Punk, New Wave, and Synthpop.

If you were a youth in the ‘80s—as some of us may be old enough to remember—you simply weren’t allowed to like both Metal and Punk at the same time. The sort of kids who were into Metal (who had the rest of us outnumbered, it always seemed) tended to be less thoughtful or reflective, and more swaggering and macho, while we “Punk” kids liked to style themselves as intellectual and artsy.

Naturally, the Metal kids tended to be the ones to ruthlessly administer the inevitable doses of adolescent mockery, ostracism and ass-kickings, while we Punks and New Wavers were usually the ones who got mocked and ostracized, and who got our asses kicked. Of course, some of the crazier and more fearless Punks might were able to channel their inner-Johnny Rotten and fight back occasionally, but as a general rule we were on the receiving end of the abuse.

And yet, one could argue that we Punks and wavers were the ones whose adopted values were most reflective of the philosophical fruits of Western, that is, “White” civilization. While we admittedly flirted with grandiose effeteness much of the time (hence the mockery and the ass-kickings), we were more prone to agree with seminal Western thinker Socrates in his famous assertion that the unexamined life is not worth living. The Metalheads, on the other hand, merely liked to drink, party, and screw, and thought it was plainly “gay” ever to question their debauched lifestyle choices. The Punks and Wavers (with the exception of the “straight-edge” ones, like myself and most of my friends) took their share of mind-altering substances, and most certainly had sex if they ever got the chance, but all the while were asking themselves, with gloomy, hyper-literate wordsmith Morrissey, “What difference does it make?”

Of course, we Wavers could be tiresome and pretentious, and we often were. But we were also very often quite sincere in our expressions of angst and anguish. The existential terror of adolescence, after all, is that one suddenly finds oneself neither fish nor fowl but a rather pitiful mixed breed, one which sprouts useless scales when it tries to fly, and is afflicted with ridiculous burdensome wings when it only wants to swim.

All of these reflections are brought to mind, interestingly enough, by the fact that Duran Duran has just released All You Need Is Now, their first album in nearly three decades to be worthy of the famous ‘80s synth-pop band’s early years of greatness.

Duran Duran, like other New Wave bands of the era, had a solidly White demographic. Yes, many of their fans were screaming little girls, wild over the lads’ pretty faces. But other, more sophisticated sorts, could appreciate their unique sound as well. It was a combination of John Taylor’s subtly funky Roxy Music-influenced grooves with a rich overlaying sheen of Nick Rhodes’s keyboard stylings and Simon LeBon’s distinctive yelping lead vocals, and lyrics that were often incomprehensibly strange (“Shake up the picture, the lizard mixture with the dance on the eventide”) and sometimes irresistibly silly (“Don’t say you’re easy on me/ You’re about as easy as a nuclear war”) that so appealed to many a connoisseur of exquisitely crafted pop excellence.

The band has persisted through the years, in one configuration or another, but at some point lapsed into depressing musical mediocrity. The grand reunion of the original five members resulted in the 2004 album Astronaut, which had a few bright moments but was generally forgettable.

It was only last year that the band decided to team with producer Mark Ronson, who in turn finally helped bring them around to embrace their early sound again. With few exceptions, All You Need is Now contains material that might have easily fit on one of the band’s first three albums. The title track and single, with its herky-jerky verses leading into a soaringly melodic and hauntingly melancholy chorus, recalls the 1983 number one-hit “The Reflex.” The odd and fascinating ode to bestial obsession “Man Who Stole a Leopard” channels the eeriely intense album cut ballad “The Chauffeur,” while the sunny singalongs “Runway Runaway” and “Too Bad You’re So Beautiful” put one in mind of the more uptempo high-energy tunes of the band’s undisputed classic “Rio.”

And there are a few other pleasant surprises. Particularly striking is “Blame the Machines,” with its air of subtle dystopian menace, and “Mediterranea,” which takes the point of view of a working-stiff’s expressed desire to take a vacation in a warm beachy place—à la the Beach Boys’ “Kokomol”—into achingly poignant territory (“We believe where the white sands touch the sea/ There’s a space for us”).

*

***
*

Duran Duran’s return to the type of music that made them great ought not go unnoticed by those who fear the imminent demise of White culture. The Fab Five (now sadly absent guitarist Andy Taylor, who left the band again in 2008) in fact represent a uniquely White sound and look that deserves to be preserved, one with intelligence, style, and hooks aplenty. We can’t all be head-banging badasses, nor should we strive to be such. It’s 2011… time to put away the bitter and foolish tribalism of our misspent Gen-X youth. Can’t we aging whiteys all get along? What’s past is past: all we need is now.

Totalitarian Pansies

In his hilarious, horrifying, and profoundly insightful short book The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis assumes the persona of a mid-level administrative demon in Hell instructing his cousin, a guardian Devil on Earth, in the myriad ways to steer his client down the slick and well-trod road to damnation. At one point, the infernal bureaucrat narrator exults at just how cleverly demonic propagandists have trained the foolish humans to be on guard against the very type of wrongdoing that is least likely to happen in a given era’s Zeitgeist:

The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic… Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants, we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

Currently, a fashionable outcry has arisen in chic circles against the sadly ubiquitous phenomenon known as “bullying.” While many people are, no doubt, sincerely opposed to wanton acts of cruelty and humiliation by the strong and well-placed against the weak and vulnerable, one must nevertheless be aware that taking a political stand against bullying is, at best, a bland, empty gesture, much like opposing drunk-driving, homelessness, child abuse, or pollution; worse, it is quite often a brazenly fraudulent stance, since bullies as such are in reality not the true target of most contemporary “anti-bullying” campaigns. Instead, certain political interest groups have hit upon the idea of characterizing their opponents as ipso facto “bullies,” simply because they have the temerity to oppose what is so obviously right and true (gay marriage, legalized abortion, or some other ideological hobbyhorse), which can only be a result of hateful and repugnant motives, the same kind of mean senior football jock to steal a puny ninth-grader’s lunch money and shove him in his locker.

One would be hard-pressed to imagine, for example, that a Christian evangelical coed who gets mocked and threatened by militant campus homosexuals for expressing her conservative values would ever be considered a victim of “bullying,” no matter how egregiously cruel the abuse she endures. Nor are crocodile tears shed for Whites who are viciously assaulted by Blacks, or for Catholics gleefully derided by Jews. No, the campaign against “bullying” is nearly always invoked solely when a “victim” group favored by the Left (Blacks, Jews, homosexuals) is seemingly wronged by the “oppressor” class (namely White heterosexual Christians).

Targeting “bullies,” then, becomes a thinly-veiled means of advancing a political agenda for a trendy-Left cause. We have seen such many such shameless examples of loathsomely cynical handwringing lately, usually attendant upon the reportage of some high-profile tragedy. When Tyler Clementi jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge after his roommate taped him having sex with a man and showed the tape online, activists were eager to pin the boy’s death on the ill-defined thought-crime of “homophobia.”  Earlier this year, when Jared Lee Loughner shot and gravely wounded U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killed several others, liberal talking-heads desperately tried to construe it as a hate crime provoked by certain designs on Sarah Palin’s website and a deterioration of “civility” in political discourse among Tea Partiers, when in actuality Loughner was a sad young paranoid schizophrenic with a pitifully deteriorating sense of reality and no connections to any political party or philosophy.

Now recently, it has emerged that one aspect of President Obama’s anti-bullying “initiative” involves public school teachers snooping around their students’ Facebook pages to see if they’re writing anything hurtful about their classmates. In addition to being an outrageous instance of the federal government ceding power to itself in a naked power grab (but what else is new?), this call for greater “pro-activity” on the part of educators in preventing bullying has certain transparent political, and politically correct, overtones. After all, in our homo-ideologized age, if a student ever playfully uses the word “fag” or utters the expression “that’s so gay,” he is to be brought before the authorities and severely reprimanded for his insensitivity, as well as shamed for his overall horribleness. One would be naïve indeed to think that this federally-funded Facebook-focused frenzy isn’t just another attempt to root out “homophobes” and subject them to deprogramming, the better to render the nation supine before the pitiless aggressions of Episcopalian bishops and Lady Gaga fans.

But who are the real bullies, and who the real victims of bullying today?

Certainly, old-school schoolyard bullies still exist, and will continue to exist. Weak, nerdy, ugly, and socially awkward kids will continue to be picked on by attractive, popular, confident, and secure ones. This is a shame, but hardly a travesty of justice; cruelty, unfortunately, is endemic to the human condition; it ought never be tolerated by anyone with a conscience, but we should never become so hubristic as to think we can somehow root it out entirely.

Personally, I am much more disgusted and appalled by the numerous powerful bullies who relentlessly vent their spleen against their enemies under the guise of being “anti-bully.” I mean the types of people who would throw men like Ernst Zundel, David Irving, Frederick Toben, and the “Heretical Two” in prison for expressing eccentric or unpopular opinions about historical events, or the sort who would prevent a peaceable group of well-dressed White men from meeting in a hotel ballroom in Charlotte, North Carolina, because they subscribe to certain un-kosher notions regarding the in-egalitarian nature of the races. The man who would rob another man of his freedom or livelihood because he doesn’t like the way he thinks is the worst kind of bully, since he disguises his cruelty as compassion; he’ll steal your lunch money and shove you in your locker, and all the while try to make it seem like you’re the bad guy.

The schoolyard bullies are ultimately of no concern. Their depredations can only last so long; their reign of terror must eventually end; they have no power over us that we don’t allow them to have. Once we attain the confidence needed to stand up to them, they leave us alone. But the hypocritical “anti-bully” bullies are a rapaciously hateful lot; opposing them just makes them angrier, and more prone to ever more coercive, tyrannical, strong-arm tactics of suppression.

Towards this latter group, we should be absolutely steely and relentless, showing no quit whatsoever. We must mock their stupid sacred cows, jeer at their attempts to shame us for not following their ridiculously nonsensical ideologies, and uproariously laugh at their maudlin expressions of naked cant and nauseating sanctimony.

Let us brave-heartedly bully the bullies who would psychologically brutalize us into humiliated submission. If we persist in heartily resisting these patently Screwtapian principalities and powers, I have confidence that our reward will be great indeed.

Christianity and Western Man

In his thought-provoking article “The Rise of Anti-Western Christianity,” Matthew Roberts boldly tackles a subject which has become a source of vexing, contentious, and at times bitter debate among the various factions which make up the contemporary alternative Right.

Indeed, the discussion which played out in the comment section accompanying Robert’s piece at AltRight is illustrative, in that it reflects the typical trajectory of the rancorous back-and-forth one commonly overhears among those who, while sharing a common sense of disgust with the Zeitgeist’s relentless ideological war on Whiteness, have differing outlooks regarding the Christian religion and its supposed culpability in this course of events.

Unfortunately, as all too often happens in the heat of a fierce debate, subtlety of argument and nuance of thought tend to go by the wayside for favor of flailing rhetorical broadstrokes and ill-conceived strawman assertions. Self-styled “race realists” have long been at the receiving end of such logically fallacious ripostes, most of which boil down to some variation on the following: “You believe in inherent genetic racial differences? Then you’re no better than HITLER!”

It need hardly be pointed out that recognizing divergent levels of intelligence among racial groups has no necessary correlation with advocating tyranny and genocide. Yet this fact never seems to sway those who fling such accusations at dissenters from the Zeitgeist’s enshrined and requisite doctrine of racial egalitarianism. This glaring nonsequitur is, in fact, formulated almost automatically, in breathtaking defiance of common sense. And one can sympathize with race-realists in this regard (who are outrageously saddled with the moral baggage of historical mass murder)… if not for the unfortunate fact that many of them have a proclivity to be just as incautious in their dismissal of the Christian faith.

Indeed, it is often said that Christianity’s universalist creed is somehow an inherent impediment to a Westerner’s healthy drive to embrace and take pride in his own heritage. In fact, if looked at properly, it is precisely the catholic (with a small “c”) orientation of the Church that lends moral legitimacy to the appropriate ethno-racial perspective. Absent the anchor of faith, and the accompanying notions of natural law and justice, one founders on nihilism, an outlook which in no time leads into the maelstrom of terror and chaos.

*
***
*

First off, however, it must be admitted that Phillip Jenkins, author of The Next Christendom, is very much a product of his age, in that he takes racial indifferentism as a matter of course. There are no really notable or significant differences between the white man, the black man, the yellow man, the red man, and the brown man, he seems to think—all races are perfectly interchangeable, one with the other. Roberts does not misrepresent Jenkins’ rather glib and flippant indifference to the crisis of faith in the West. He correctly notes, in fact, that Jenkins pretty much shrugs at the Third World-ization of Christianity and the ongoing demographic and religious collapse of the West. In this sense, Jenkins has much in common with both “liberal” and ostensibly “conservative” wings of contemporary Western Christendom, both of which have enthusiastically embraced the race-neutral perspective in every regard (since to do otherwise would mean to be “just like Hitler”; see above).

But even if such a perspective is ubiquitous in our age, it ought not be concluded that the origin of this mindset is the universalistic creed of Christianity. After all, the Christian faith has existed for nearly two millennia, and only in the last half-century has its creed been construed in such a manner. In truth, while Christian doctrine does, indeed, believe in the equal spiritual status of all races (all men having been fashioned in the image and likeness of God), it in no sense maintains the interchangeability of one race with another, or the desirability of different races dwelling together, that is, multiculturalism. Just as the Church has always maintained that men and women, while each loved by God, are different, and ideally designed to play different roles, so there is nothing in the Christian creed which insists that, as über-douche Bono once warbled, “all the colors will bleed into one.” Indeed, while “people are people” (as the somewhat less douche-y but still annoying Depeche Mode singer informed us), common sense and simple observation helps one to see that differences between us are at least as notable and significant as our similarities.

What is more, it is only through a transcendentalist creed like Christianity that one is enabled to advocate for justice for one’s own people, because only a transcendent, universalist perspective gives one the obligation to stand up for what is right, good, and proper. Racial advocacy in the absence of such clear-cut moral precepts inevitably becomes arbitrary notions that undermine themselves.

Let us return to our oft-cited friend Hitler here to discuss the perfect example of this short-sighted ideological tactic…

In Mein Kampf, the mustachioed one thunders against the “November criminals” whom, he believed, betrayed his country at the end of World War I. He also inveighs against the harsh and vindictive terms of the Versailles treaty, which seemed to be designed specially to humiliate Germans. And, of course, he rails against the Jews, calling them (among other things) wanton, cruel, deceitful, and untrustworthy.

Let us leave behind the question of whether Hitler’s claims about the November criminals, the Versailles treaty, and the perfidious nature of the Jews were true or false; let’s assume for argument’s sake, in fact, that they are, in fact, all true. Hitler seems to be making the point that his people have been treated unfairly, and deserve redress. This is well and good… but then Hitler’s patently atheistic and social Darwinist views seem to undermine whatever moral case could have been made against the legitimate grievances he expressed previously. Germany needs to crush its enemies, and show no mercy—weakness must not be tolerated, ever, at any juncture—Might Makes Right—the strong dominate the weak—such is the way of nature.

Well, if these things are so, one might ask the angry Austrian autobiographer, then why should anyone care that Germany was humiliated? Why be angry with the Jew for allegedly seeking the German’s destruction, when the German would just as soon do the same thing to the Jew if their situations were reversed?

In other words, where is the claim to justice? And indeed, in the wake of the devastation of World War II, why are we supposed to shed crocodile tears for battered, bombed-out Dresden, for the victims of merciless Allied aerial raids on civilian centers in Hamburg and Berlin and elsewhere? How can we, why should we feel the least bit sorry for Germany, following Hitler’s own Nietzschian-Darwinian-derived worship of ruthless strength? After all, the stronger force always wins out in the end anyway, or else it couldn’t very well be called “stronger,” could it?

The Christian conception of things is quite different. It insists, not that might makes right, but that a just cause is a just cause, whether it be temporally triumphant or not. If a nation or a race is oppressed, then it has valid grounds to seek redress. Just as individuals possess the inherent dignity of being  children of God, so does a particular subset of humanity. Thus, Whites, like any other race of men, are not enjoined to suffer being humiliated, run down, insulted, or be forced into dispossession of their inheritance.

The notion that Christianity makes white Westerners into meek little lambs fit for racial dilution, if not slaughter, is thus a crass and ill-informed misconception. For it is in the context of Christianity—or some other universal vision of humanity and human justice—that White advocates can be sure of the worthiness of their cause.

Of course, Christian doctrine also warns us not to mistreat other peoples, just as we would demand not to be mistreated ourselves. If some would chafe against this restraint as somehow weak and unmanly, let us remember that the alternative (“might makes right”) has much more potential to backfire badly if our side suffers a temporal setback. Christianity enjoins all people and all races to be mindful of justice, regardless of who is strong and who is weak. One need not jettison racial pride or preference for one’s own ethnic particularity to comprehend the wisdom of precisely such a universalist perspective.