Arts and Clture and Politics

Thanksgiving: “Lincoln” and “Django Unchained”

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The problem with holidays like Thanksgiving is that they give White people the impression that nothing has really changed. Just like when we were young, there is a huge Thanksgiving dinner, football on TV, and family get-togethers. The only difference is that now it’s all followed by an orgy of shopping on Black Friday, which now often begins in the wee hours of Friday morning or even on Thursday.

So the average American sits around all day, adds a few pounds, and then marches off to buy cool stuff. Life goes on much as it has for decades.

And that’s the problem. Only around 30% of White males and 40% of White females support the current government in a country that was founded, built, and run by Whites until very recently. … But all that seems fairly irrelevant when you are celebrating Thanksgiving.

It’s like the Fourth of July: All those fireworks make a lot of White Americans think that they still live in the country they grew up in.

So there’s no sense of urgency because life for most of us is pretty much the way it has always been.  There’s certainly some anxiety and anger about the election among Whites. In the back of their mind, there is worry that the multicultural future might not turn out as advertised. But all that is put on the back burner on holidays like Thanksgiving. Most Americans can hardly wait to get to the mall. Read more

Lee Siegel: Exuding Jewish Triumphalism

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A bit of Jewish triumpalism by Lee Siegel in the Wall Street Journal (“Rise of the Tiger Nation“). The basic plot line is that Jews overcame WASP dominance to attain the high ground in American culture. Now there is a rising Asian minority which, according to a Pew  Research Center Study is “the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.”

My basic premise is that it is entirely reasonable for elites to resist displacement. For Siegel, the Jewish displacement of the WASP elite is a morality tale, with Jews as the good guys. The WASPs resisted by establishing quotas at Ivy League universities. They resented Jewish incursions into “WASP bastions such as rarefied country clubs, exclusive professional clubs, white-shoe law firms, prestigious foundations and the like…[;] these were the very institutions that resisted them the most intensely.” Writing from his position as a dominant elite, Siegel is not shy at hinting that some complaints about Jews were quite reasonable:

One reason that anti-Semitism persisted even as Jews ascended in American life was that Jews were frequently in the vanguard of American social and political dissent, from the anarchist Emma Goldman to Yippie Abbie Hoffman and beyond. Not only that, but many of the architects of America’s archenemy, Soviet Communism, had been Jews. As the WASP establishment lost ground to Jewish newcomers, the words “communist” and “Jew” often became synonymous. The association of Hollywood with lax morality, and of Jews with Hollywood, heightened a kind of low-grade hum of anti-Jewish feeling, even as it proved the general acceptance of the Jewish sentiments and sensibility that permeated American entertainment.

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“Flight”: Denzel Washington’s New Movie, Part II

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Now comes a truly sardonic confirmation that I am right. A good part of my teaching involves showing the changing images of a high-level American vocation that has not changed much racially over the last century: that of the pilot. Few careers have for so long captivated the imaginations of American boys and men. See Joseph Corn’s wonderful book The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation or read anything about flying by the peerless Ernest Gann to capture this romance. Gann’s 1953 novel The High and the Mighty became a film featuring that stalwart American actor, John Wayne. Read more

“Flight”: Denzel Washington’s New Movie, Part I

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I find myself in a conflicted position. While I enjoy being right as much as the next guy, it hurts to be right about something with negative consequences. Imagine, for example, that you are convinced you have a serious malady, yet your stubborn doctor pooh-pooh’s your concerns. As a result, you conduct a grueling online search and eventually pin down your ailment to an obscure but quite harmful degenerative disease.

You take these results to a more accommodating doctor, who indeed confirms your suspicious. You, then, are left congratulating yourself for outwitting your original doctor — but you have also confirmed that your quality of life is inextricably going to erode. Mixed emotions, right?

I suffer from a parallel syndrome. For well over a decade I’ve been parsing Hollywood films and finding in them a pronounced bias against straight White European-derived males. To be sure, we still have traditional fare with White male stars as the lead — think George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, even Mel Gibson now and again. But we also find so many films in which only the White guy is bad.

What really troubles me is the fact that so much of this imagery is counterfactual. We race realists know that it is White males who have built so much of civilization over the last five centuries and that now it is we who bear the brunt of the anti-White multicultural onslaught. The cultural Marxists have cleverly used women and minorities against White males, and we see this imagery many times a day now. Go to your bank’s website, for instance, and I’ll bet you’ll see a parade of non-White faces and smart White women staring back at you. Try, however, to spot the White males. It’s often not easy. Read more

How They Lie to Us: the film Margin Call

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Paul Craig Roberts made an intriguing reference the other day. He wrote that “a noted philosopher wrote an article in which he suggested that Americans live in an artificial or virtual reality. Another noted philosopher said that he thought there was a 25% chance that the philosopher was right. I am convinced that he is right. Americans live in the Matrix. Nothing that they know or think that they know is correct.” I agree.

The media, of course, is a constituent part of that Matrix, and I am particularly interested in the Hollywood branch of the media. Needless to say, most TOO readers are probably aware of Hollywood’s pronounced anti-White, anti-Christian bias and are clued in to the ways they subvert traditional White Christian culture.

One of my favorite essays unpacking Hollywood’s subversion has always been Kevin Beary’s “Adorno’s Bastards: Pleasantville and the Frankfurt School,” which parses the storyline of the anti-White film Pleasantville. Unfortunately, Beary’s colorful site with film stills has disappeared, leaving only this truncated version on another site.

Readers know I have done readings of many films and may also know that I’ve written quite a bit about Jewish involvement in finance and deception in that field (see here, here, and here). Today I’d like to write a review of a movie that encompasses both.

J.C. Chandor’s 2011 film Margin Call tells a story that loosely mirrors the fall of Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers. Even for Hollywood, however, the deception in this movie is staggering, and it occurs on many levels. It terrifies me to think that the masses will swallow this tale, particularly the images that will have such a powerful subliminal impact. Read more

The Southern Point: Rhetorically Speaking, Part 2

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John Randolph of Roanoke as a youth, Gilbert Stuart, 1804–1805

The rhetorician who practices “amplification” is not thereby misleading his audience, because we are all men of limited capacity and sensitivity and imagination. We all need to have things pointed out to us, things stressed in our interest. The very task of the rhetorician is to determine what feature of a question is most exigent and to use the power of language to make it appear so.

–Richard Weaver, Language is Sermonic, pp. 219–220

Richard Weaver’s writing lays an ideal groundwork for a counter movement against the status quo modernist worldview, which has hitherto dominated ethnic discourse in the United States, towards a more authentic American conservative position able to embrace the racial concerns of Whites. Weaver teaches us how to persuade without exploiting, in a format conducive to the natural tendencies of the rural conservative mentality, the largest cross-section of the American populace—a constituency that we must win.  Neutrality is not an option.  If we don’t inspire this group’s allegiance, it will be fielded into the ranks of our enemies.

In “The Cultural Role of Rhetoric” Weaver argues that it is important to point out the distinctions between dialectic and rhetoric because their respective functions have been confused in modern times. Dialectic thinking is logical in an abstract vacuum of perception. When applied to human endeavor it tries to use a rational technique to solve problems that are also deeply entwined with history, custom, and culture. However, it is ill-equipped to think in these terms.  For example, think of how out of touch a computer would be if it was given the task of solving humanity’s problems. It may have a superior grasp of logical principles, but in the absence of an understanding of human nature and human interests and desires, it could not possibly generate  adaptive solutions. Likewise, dialectic taken out of its proper function does not deliver an accurate holistic picture of man and his condition in time.  Weaver suggests that this may have been a contributing factor in the Athenian justification of Socrates’ execution: too much dialectic. Read more

Review of Thomas Martin’s “The Victory of Humanism”

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The Victory of Humanism: The Psychology of Humanist Art, Modernism, and “Race”
Thomas Martin
Palm Coast, FL: Backintyme, 2011; 177 pages

There can be little doubt that in historical perspective, perhaps the most important upheaval in Western culture has been the decline of aristocratic culture. This is apparent, for example, in two recent books that have influenced my thinking, Ricardo Duchesne’s The Uniqueness of Western Civilization and Andrew Fraser’s The WASP Question (my review will appear in the first issue (June) of Radix, a new magazine edited by Alex Kurtagic and Richard Spencer). For Duchesne, aristocratic individualism is the key to understanding the uniqueness and creativity of the West. Fraser laments the decline of Indo-European aristocratic culture, beginning with the Puritan revolution of the 17th century and carried to its logical conclusion in America with the defeat of the South in the Civil War.

Thomas Martin’s The Victory of Humanism focuses on the decline of aristocratic culture in Western art. Following the “perfection of antiquity,” the breakthrough occurred in the Renaissance with the work of Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael, and Michalangelo.

A critical observation by Vasari is that those artists achieved perfection by only portraying the beautiful. They did this by using the most beautiful examples of the human body or nature. In this way, they achieved the idealization or perfection of both body and nature.  In fact, Vasari goes so far as to say that Michelangelo was so wedded to the idea of perfection that he had a policy of never doing a portrait of a living person.This would have been descending away form the ideal in the “mind of God” or the human mind, and losing himself in the particular of the empirical.

Martin correctly points out that this sense of ideal human form is an innate part of human psychology. Evolutionary psychologists have shown that the faces that humans find attractive are generalized. That is, faces that are produced by averaging dozens of real photos are judged attractive. Martin expands on this by suggesting that “there is a certain nobility in the generalized face, which helps create the sense that it is ideal. Seeing the face that is in the mind takes the viewer above or out of this world and into the mind, the most powerful and noble part of our bodies.” Read more