THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
In
his second inauguration speech, Bush pronounced the word
"freedom" twenty-eight times, the word
"free" seven times and the word
"liberty" fifteen times: he sounded like
he was singing the Internationale. Bush
makes a highly moralistic appeal to universal values,
which he says America embodies and which he insists
"are right and true for all people everywhere."
"Freedom," he has said, "is the
non-negotiable demand of human dignity; the birthright of
every person -- in every civilization." Laced
as it is with religious (often esoteric and even
apocalyptic) vocabulary – the American president
frequently says that freedom is God’s plan for mankind
-- Bush’s Messianic political discourse recalls the
Marxist movement which swept through Latin America in the
1970s, conjugating God and politics and which was known as
"liberation theology."
It
is this promise to emancipate the whole of mankind which
so endears George Bush to a phalanx of former Marxist
ideologues like Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, John
Lloyd, Julie Burchill and David Aaronovitch. People
who in their youth idolised the worker "who has no
country" have little difficulty identifying with
today’s cosmopolitan ideology of globalization or with
George Bush’s internationalism. Hitchens has defended
his own surprising work with the neoconservatives by
saying, "I feel much more like I used to in the
1960s, working with revolutionaries," and he
understands that George Bush’s policy of regime change
is by definition going to be supported by revolutionaries.
As he pointed out, with his customary clarity, in a recent
debate on the Today programme with his brother,
Peter, "It is right, I think, that conservatives
oppose regime change: that is what conservatives do."
Support
for the programme of world revolution also explains the
support given by ten Eastern European heads of government,
nearly all of them former communist apparatchiks, who,
almost alone in the world, lined up obediently to sign an
open letter of support for the impending Iraq war in
February 2003. "Dissidents" in Eastern
Europe -- broadly speaking, the people who are now in
power -- were not anti-communists at all, but instead
"critical" Marxists who worked within the
Communist system to reform it, not destroy it. Bush’s
announced fight "against tyranny" is of obvious
appeal to those who used to rally around the old communist
cry of "anti-fascism," which in turn was largely
a slogan expressing leftist hostility to the nation and
the state, both of which are now deeply unpopular concepts
in the West.
-- John
Laughland
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.49 pm, 10 November 2005►
SITUATION
VACANT
Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours, 732
Of which
Gibbon wrote,
A
victorious line of march had been prolonged above a
thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of
the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have
carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the
Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable
than the Nile or Euphrates,
and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval
combat into the mouth of the Thames.
Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of
Oxford,
and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people
the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammed.
For the
want of a hammer, the West is lost.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 8.41 pm, 9 November 2005►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
I was not
surprised to see Islamics use cultural Marxism as a
weapon, any more than it surprises me to watch cultural
Marxists use mass immigration as a weapon. Both have the
same objective, the destruction of the Christian West and
the equivalent of a Ribbentrop-Molotov
Pact between them makes sense. No matter
that the cultural Marxists hate Allah as much as they hate
J-hw-h or the Holy Trinity or that the Islamic scimitar
would quickly be put to the necks of the cultural
Marxists; until the Christian West is dead and buried,
each can use the other.
-- William
S. Lind
"Rendezvous," David Low, London Evening
Standard, 20 September 1939
Kevin
Michael Grace, 1.26 pm, 9 November 2005►
WITHOUT MARX, JESUS OR DARWIN
As a once great nation lies supine at the feet of Arabic racaille, one cannot but ask, what's happened to the French? Please spare me talk of "cheese-eating surrender monkeys." Unless, of course, you are willing to include among these simians
Dubya
(delighted to prostrate America at the feet of Mexican
rabble) and Condi, who together have made the
Koran and
Ramadan as American as the flag pin and microwave burritos. Yes, France is effete, rootless and atomized, but of which Western nation can this not be said? Why even speak of nations? They have been replaced by
global administrative units, whose leaders, quislings without qualities, have effected the great modern exchange: citizenship
traded for sex, sports, shopping and scientism.
What to do as we await
dhimmitude and the tender mercies of shariah? Well, we could do worse than read
Whatever,
The Elementary Particles and
Platform, the first three novels of the Frenchman
Michel Houellebecq, who proves that one doesn't have to be drunk and disorderly to speak the truth about the way we live now, but it doesn't hurt. I reviewed them in the November 18, 2002 issue of
The Report.
Say, have you heard of this French writer Michel
Houellebecq?
Michel what?
Pronounced "Well-beck." Just
acquitted of race hatred in a French court for having called Islam the "stupidest religion." Predicted the
Bali
bombings, you know.
Really?
Yes, the most astonishing literary prediction since Anthony Burgess foretold John Lennon's murder and apotheosis in
Enderby
Outside.
So what is he, one of those deconstructionists?
No, he's admirably readable. Certainly gloomy, though.
Aren't all those Frenchies gloomy?
Well, he's gloomier than most. Consider this, from
Whatever:
The fact is that nothing can halt the ever-increasing recurrence of those moments when your total isolation, the sensation of an all-consuming emptiness, the foreboding that your existence is nearing a painful and definitive end all combine to plunge you into a state of real
suffering.
Why doesn't he have a drink, take a pill, get a girl?
He's done all that. Sex addict, morphine addict, drinks like a fish.
Then he's clinically depressed. A suitable case for treatment.
He's had that, too. Didn't take.
He's just a nut, then, a crazy nut.
Michel Houellebecq believes himself sane; it's the world that's mad. He comes by his depression honestly. His biography on a
fansite begins,
[He] was born on the 26th of February 1958, on the French island of
Réunion. His father, a mountain guide, and his mother, an
anesthesiologist, soon lost all interest in his existence. A half-sister was born four years later. At the age of six, Michel was given over to the care of his paternal grandmother, a communist, whose family name he later
adopted.
Houellebecq: The terror of infinite sex
Houellebecq's parents abandoned him because they were hippies. Sexual revolutionaries. The most important thing to understand about Houellebecq is that he is a reactionary, opposed to relativism in all its forms. Yet he is a child of the spirit of the age. He could sing, with
Matt
Johnson, "I'm just a symptom of the moral decay that's gnawing at the heart of the country."
The 1960s witnessed a revolution in consciousness as momentous as any in history. As Tom Wolfe wrote in his 1975 essay,
"The Me Generation and the Third Great
Awakening":
The husband and wife who sacrifice their own ambitions and their material assets in order to provide for a
"better future" for their children...the soldier who risks his life, or perhaps consciously sacrifices it, in battle...the man who devotes his life to some struggle for
"his people" that cannot possibly be won in his
lifetime ... people (or most of them) who buy life insurance or leave
wills ... are people who conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream. Just as something of their ancestors lives on in them, so will something of them live on in their
children ... or in their people, their race, their
community -- for childless couples, too, conduct their lives and try to arrange their post-mortem affairs with concern for how the great stream is going to flow on. Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking,
"I have only one life to live."
If the past is another country, the past Wolfe describes is Carthage. Houellebecq is a New Regime Man. Deprived of parental affection, his mind poisoned by sex education, he is incapable of regarding women as other than erotic machines. He knows little of them and doesn't care. His female characters are ciphers. His male characters are versions of his bifurcated personality: feckless and
sensual or monomaniacal and ascetic.
In 1971 the French intellectual Jean-François Revel published
Without Marx or
Jesus. It would have a profound effect on France and on much of the West. In the
words of Joseph R.
Stromberg, it celebrates
the Americans's looming post-Christian and non-socialist society, which rested on a firm foundation of mass consumption by newly liberated individuals detached from all
tradition.
Houellebecq's
mordant and often hilarious novels are Revel's vision made flesh: a savage world of men without qualities, without love, without families, without community, deracinated and utterly alone. In
Whatever, the protagonist attempts to prove himself alive by persuading his even more pathetic colleague to murder a copulating couple. He
fails and goes mad, then his colleague is killed in a car crash.
In The Elementary Particles (also known by its somewhat-more-to-the-point British title
Atomised), Houellebecq makes a daring advance on Revel. While he agrees that materialism destroyed Christianity (for which he has a great nostalgia), he argues that the uncertainty principle of
Werner Heisenberg has destroyed materialism. God is dead, but so is progress. Consumer goods get better and better, but no one believes anymore that man gets better and better. Evolutionary theory is expiring from the effort to constrain a stochastic universe that cannot help but fly apart.
The Elementary Particles is an audacious work; it begins with two half-brothers at the end of their tethers and ends with the end of life as we know it.
Walter Pater declared, "All art constantly aspires to the condition of music." Today it appears that all art aspires to the condition of pornography. While
Whatever is crude, and The Elementary Particles is frankly pornographic,
Platform is, as they say, completely concerned with sex. Its premise is that Western men and women can no longer enjoy sex with each
other and is an open endorsement of "sex tourism." Only outside the West, Houellebecq argues, can women find men that are masculine as Western men used to be and men find women that are feminine as Women used to be. It all ends badly, in terrorism and mass murder. While there are many in the Orient grateful to exchange sex for money, there are others infuriated by this irruption of Western decadence into their societies. Violence, as Marshall McLuhan reminded us, is the quest for identity. It is the only weapon Islam has against the West's manifestly superior and otherwise ineluctable technologies.
Houellebecq's
penchant pornographique is distressing and confounding. Pure fantasy, it seems to be an attempt to concoct a substitute religion. As Tom Wolfe
writes:
Ah! At the apex of my soul is a spark of the
Divine ... which I perceive in the pure moment of ecstasy (which your textbooks call
"the orgasm," but which I know to be heaven).
Here again Houellebecq is revealed as the child of his parents and of our age.
There are a lot of Houellebecqs about.
The Elementary Particles has sold 300,000 copies in France alone. His fansite
is dedicated to "all those who, deeply moved, have been transformed by a novel or a poem by
Michel and who have felt the need to share their discovery of this writer with someone dear to them."
For all his disgustingness,
he is a great writer. Often compared to
Louis-Ferdinand
Céline, he is better compared to Blaise
Pascal. Never was it truer that "The last act is bloody, however charming the rest of the play may be." Broadband Internet and ever-improving microwave pizzas are not much of an answer to the increasingly acute problem of existence. Definitely, it's a problem.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 1.54 am, 9 November 2005►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
There is a
difference between 29 and 30. When you are 29 it can be
the beginning of everything. When you are 30 it can be the
end of everything.
-- Gertrude Stein, Mrs
Reynolds and Five Earlier Novelettes
Kevin
Michael Grace, 2.31 am, 8 November 2005►
POETRY
CORNER
A
Shropshire Lad XXVI
Along the field as we came by
A year ago, my love and I,
The aspen over stile and stone
Was talking to itself alone.
"Oh who are these that kiss and pass?
A country lover and his lass;
Two lovers looking to be wed;
And time shall put them both to bed,
But she shall lie with earth above,
And he beside another love."
And sure enough beneath the tree
There walks another love with me,
And overhead the aspen heaves
Its rainy-sounding silver leaves;
And I spell nothing in their stir,
But now perhaps they speak to her,
And plain for her to understand
They talk about a time at hand
When I shall sleep with clover clad,
And she beside another lad.
-- AE
Housman
Kevin
Michael Grace, 2.06 am, 8 November 2005►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
For the
West, I do not feel hatred. At most I feel a great
contempt. I know only that every single one of us reeks of
selfishness, masochism and death. We have created a system
in which it has simply become impossible to live, and
what’s more, we continue to export it.
-- Michel Houellebecq, Platform
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.58 pm, 6 November 2005►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
What
is inherent in welfare state democracy could only have
developed because bourgeois liberals gave way to another
dominant class, the current political one whose cheering
gallery includes today’s pseudo-conservative movement...
American
conservatism closely resembles the Postmarxist Left, the
theme of my
latest book, in its showcasing of a
globalist, egalitarian ideology. Both are post-liberal and
heavily influenced by the rhetoric and vision of the
revolutionary Left. Each pursues a politics of guilt
toward recognized victims, although obviously some victim
groups that rate high on the European Left, like Muslims,
are less beloved to American "conservative"
leaders. Both devote considerable energy to fighting
"fascist" phantoms in a way that is reminiscent
of the European Left of the 1930s...
American
"conservatism," like the European Left, is a
movement that cannibalizes its members, as soon as they
depart from the announced new direction. Neither has the
substance or the firm belief system that characterized
European Marxism, and both drift opportunistically from
one dogmatically held position to another, each of which
is upheld indignantly and inflexibly against dissenters.
In Europe the Postmarxist Left has turned ferociously
against former Leftist politicians who have challenged the
merits of further Third World immigration, arguing that it
is harmful for the working class and that the incoming
Muslims treat women badly. In the US those on the right
who have questioned the neoconservative war against Iraq,
the pro-immigration views of the World Street Journal
or the neoconservative interpretation of the civil rights
movement have been read out of the respectable Right as
"extremists" or as those who "flirt with
fascism."
Characteristic
of the neoconservative-controlled Right and the
Postmarxist Left is the lack of a vital center, outside of
the personalities of powerful journalists, and the
tendency to demonize those who resist party lines...
But
even more than the current Postmarxist Left in Europe, the
conservative movement has thrown
people off the bus, if those believed to be
in charge of the movement decide that the expellees
don’t fit. Since the purge victims have made the media
Left feel uncomfortable, this "house-cleaning," celebrated
by EJ Dionne in his most recent remarks
about Buckley, has won predictable media applause. But
while the commended purges may have targeted some
unpleasant eccentrics, praising Buckley for inquisitorial
zeal is a dishonest reaction to character assassination.
It is a bit like extolling the American Communist Party
for criticizing Hitler and the excesses of the Red Scare
without bringing up the rest of the story. The seamy side
of both of the aforementioned objects of praise is thereby
placed beyond consideration.
In
the case of the conservative movement, it is precisely
that shadow side that dominates its history. The
appearance of continuity is no more than that, a
deliberately fostered illusion that allows the gullible to
believe in a steady, natural progression of ideas and in
the long-term peaceful interaction of their exponents.
Nothing of this kind has happened. Despite the window
dressing that has come from well-intentioned
intellectuals, the conservative movement that arose in the
50s has been a series of purges, and those kicked off the
bus have been reviled and in some cases professionally
ruined, with the help of mainstream Leftists. Overlooking
this fact, in the manner of recent historians of the
conservative movement, is to ignore the glaringly obvious.
-- Paul
Gottfried
Kevin
Michael Grace, 7.51 pm, 4 November 2005►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
Americans were
once a brave and forward-looking people, willing to face
the facts, willing to work hard, to acknowledge the common
good and contribute to it, willing to make difficult
choices. We've become a nation of overfed clowns and
crybabies, afraid of the truth, indifferent to the common
good, hardly even a common culture, selfish, belligerent,
narcissistic whiners seeking every means possible to live
outside a reality-based community.
These are the
consequences of a value system that puts comfort,
convenience, and leisure above all other considerations.
These are not enough to hold a civilization together.
We've signed off on all other values since the end of
World War Two. Our great victory over manifest evil half a
century ago was such a triumph that we have effectively --
and incrementally -- excused ourselves from all other
duties, obligations and responsibilities.
Which is exactly why we have come to refer to ourselves as
consumers. That's what we call ourselves on TV, in the
newspapers, in the legislatures. Consumers. What a
degrading label for people who used to be citizens.
Consumers have
no duties, obligations, or responsibilities to anything
besides their own desire to eat more Cheez Doodles and
drink more beer. Think about yourself that way for 20 or
30 years and it will affect the collective spirit very
negatively. And our behaviour. The biggest losers, of
course, end up being the generations of human beings who
will follow us, because in the course of mutating into
consumers, preoccupied with our Cheez Doodle consumption,
we gave up on the common good, which means that we gave up
on the future and the people who will dwell in it.
-- James
Howard Kunstler (and see here)
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.44 pm, 3 November 2005►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
Human
beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at
computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and
listening to eight different bosses drone on about
"mission statements."
-- Peter Gibbons, Office
Space (Mike Judge)
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.55 pm, 2 November 2005►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
I'm
not a technophobe at all. I use a computer for my music,
and I've got a laptop right here that I'll inevitably use
at some point today. I stay online constantly, and I'm
very interested in the latest gadgets. On the other hand,
I'm not so sure that we should necessarily back ourselves
up on a disk or view babies as a commodity to be chosen.
"What IQ would you like? 150? For a small extra
charge we can go up to 160!" I don't know if we're
cut out to have that kind of control over our own species.
-- Steve
Reich
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.41 pm, 1 November 2005►
