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Quantum Dylan: A Double Act, Part 1

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Bob Dylan’s 70th anniversary was celebrated worldwide on May 24th. Hailed as the Shakespeare of his generation, Dylan has sold more than 58 million albums, and written more than 500 songs recorded by more than 2000 artists. Dylan has described himself as “a person who owns the Sixties.”  At the same time, he has spent a lifetime “despising the nineteen-sixties — all the while being held up everywhere as its avatar.”[1] To post-1968 generations, the remarkable success of Robert Allen Zimmerman – alias Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham — remains “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”  While the success of his precursors Elvis and Sinatra is easily explainable, neither looks, nor voice, nor charisma can explain Dylan’s unique and enduring iconic status.  He has been described as diffuse, ugly, even dirty — “His ‘diffuseness’ muddies all the waters whose streams make him up.”[2]

Deconstructing the binary high/low culture divide

In postmodern discourse, the status of ‘high culture’ –- perhaps reaching its historical climax with Clement Greenberg’s 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” –- has been undermined through exposure of its “inherently White, class-based, West-centric, and gendered elements.”[3] Postmodern discourse tends to break down distinctions between subject and object, consciousness and the unconscious, “oppressor” and “oppressed,” spectacle and spectator, “high” and “low,” etc.   The movement of “canon into kitsch, or identification into stylization or exaggeration”[4] can be seen in the art of Andy Warhol —  often seen as postmodernism’s chief avatar, “the locus classicus for the deconstruction of ‘mass production,’ and the figure who summarily disrupts every distinction there is, especially the difference between high and low.”[5] Hence, postmodernism seems to express a kind of cultural logic that sociologist Charles Lemert has described as relativistic:

The most important feature of the matrix is that, being relative, it overthrows the rationalist distinctions between the “big” and the “small,” the “greater” and the “lesser,” the “higher” and the “lower,” and so forth.  In other words, while the principles of complementarity and indeterminacy rebel against the rationalist epistemological distinction between knowing subject and known object, the relativistic principle overthrows the rationalist ontological perspective that views the natural and human world in hierarchical terms.  Relativity radically equalizes all things, persons, events, and facts in reality.  All things become platitudinous and, simultaneously, the platitude reigns supreme.[6]

Bob Dylan seems to fit into this picture as a figure heralded by intellectual elites as erasing the distinction between “high” and “low” culture.  Rock music has oftentimes (stereotypically) been portrayed as ‘low culture’ — as “anti-intellectual, concerned with the sensual, bodily effects of music rather than with rational thought.”[7] Beneath the surface, however, Dylan’s gravitas — attained from being a ”serious” folk artist — has been important for the ideology of rock as a “higher” cultural form. This ideology (or cultural strategy) has been staged through an alloy of myths, branding and cultural codes. Read more

“Whiteness” as a Theological Problem: J Kameron Carter on Race

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Mainstream Christian theology today seems determined to confuse the worship of Christ with the worship of the poor, the suffering, and the marginalized.  Such confusion reflects the influence of modern Christian humanism which dissolves differences of race, class, gender, or sexual orientation into a common “humanity.”  In Theologian Daniel C. Migliore’s words (149–150), “human beings” are created in the “image of God…to be persons in communion with God and others.”  But “[i]f we are created for relationship with God who is wholly different from us, sin is a denial of our essential relatedness to those who are genuinely ‘other.’”  A sinful “human intolerance for difference” leads many to reject “the victim, the poor, the ‘leftover person.’”  In the social gospel of liberal Protestantism, as taught by Migliore, human beings deny Christ—the Word incarnate in poor, suffering flesh—when they assert the will to power over the “other.”  Black American theologian J Kameron Carter asserts (368), however, that “privileged” White folks, in particular, compounded that sin by transforming the desire for domination and mastery over others into a science; as a consequence, their communion with God can be restored only by uniting themselves with the poor, Black victims of scientific racism “since that is where Christ is.”

Naturally, Migliore, too, deplores the heavy over-representation of Black people among the underclass in American society.  He also attributes the condition of Black America to the sinful “spirit of mastery over others” (140) that is responsible for the dismal history of patriarchy, racism, and colonialism in modern Western history generally.  Carter issues a more pointed indictment, charging that the modernist political theology of “Whiteness” “created an analytics of race that tyrannically divides creation” between a Western overclass and the underworld inhabited by the “wretched of the earth” (345)—a reference to Frantz Fanon’s book of the same title. Read more

Review of Confessions of a Reluctant Hater

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Confessions of a Reluctant Hater, by Greg JohnsonGreg Johnson is a radical, an elitist, perhaps even a dreaded “vanguardist”. He doesn’t waste what little patience he has on the myriad schemes concocted by White Advocates to compromise our goals, water down our message, or conceal our agenda. His debut book, Confessions of a Reluctant Hater, is ostensibly “some of [his] more introductory and topical essays and reviews, pieces that might be useful for people just beginning to explore White Nationalism.” While it makes progress toward that familiar objective, it stands out from the pack of primers by persuasively arguing our side without meeting the reader half way.

Dr. Johnson intuitively understands what it took me years to figure out: that bourgeoisie respectability and our survival are at this point integrally incompatible. In this inverted world where our opponents control every last institution which rewards “respect” and popular approval, one can either be respectable or honorable. One cannot be both. In the article, The Persecution of American Renaissance, he dismisses the the system’s legitimacy with the naked contempt it’s earned:

Whenever some Third World dictator cancels elections, shreds a constitution, or persecutes his political opponents, we all know what is happening. Given the choice between preserving the legitimacy of the system or preserving personal advantage, he chooses personal advantage and discards the props of legitimacy as just that: meaningless props.

America’s ruling establishment now faces a similar choice.

This article was in response to the first cancellation, with his thesis proving prescient in light of the exceedingly ham-fisted efforts to silence dissent the following year. Given the government’s declaration of a “state of emergency” in Memphis, the mayor’s meddling in Charlotte, and the flat refusal to pursue the leftist terrorists who made threats, the notion that our troubles are merely due to private venues exercising their right of association by refusing to do business with us can and should be dismissed as the “meaningless prop” that it is.

Read more

The Southern Point: The Identity of “We”

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I go, but not to Avalon
Or any cloud-capped promontory hid
Beyond the eyes of men. The battle’s end
Is now my fortune, but this change of state
Confounds me not. A duller magic rules
Until the blood shall speak again.

-Donald Davidson, from “Geography of the Brain”

Montgomery, Alabama is a strange place. I grew up there. My parents grew up there. My grandparents grew up there. In fact, two of my ancestors (a couple of brothers) are still cited amongst the pioneering frontiersmen of the original settlement. So, what could possibly be so strange about a place to one with such deep roots stretching all the way back to the beginning?

Well, in truth, I don’t live there anymore. Occasionally, I visit.  Whenever I do, however, I get troubled by a number of difficult contradictions and I end up feeling like…well, like a stranger in my own town. You see, there’s a certain level at which the cultural soil seems to be rejecting the likes of me these days. It’s not at the deepest level of the full matrix but nevertheless it’s enough to make me wonder about the quality of my future blossoming potential in what has always been my neck of the woods. Read more

Stephen Jay Gould: Next to Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius in the Devil’s Mouth at the Center of Hell

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In a reissue of The Mismeasure of Man in 1996 Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “May I end up next to Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius in the devil’s mouth at the center of hell if I ever fail to present my most honest assessment and best judgment of the evidence for empirical truth” (p. 39). So we definitely know where to find him.

We have known this for some time, but a recent study nicely nails it down (see “Study Debunks Stephen Jay Gould’s Claim of Racism on Morton Skulls,” NYTimes, June 14, 2011).  Samuel George Morton, who died in 1851, had measured skulls from around the world and found race differences in skull size. Gould claimed that he had remeasured Morton’s skulls and found that Morton had “unconsciously” falsified the measurements to fit his “racist” preconceptions that Africans had smaller brains. But now

physical anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania, which owns Morton’s collection, have remeasured the skulls, and in an article that does little to burnish Dr. Gould’s reputation as a scholar, they conclude that almost every detail of his analysis is wrong. Read more

Whites Feel Discriminated Against

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A recent  psychology paper suggests a bit of trouble on the road to our glorious multicultural future. The title says it all: “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing” by Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers (Perspectives on Psychological Science 6(3), 215-218, 2011). The paper documents “an emerging belief in anti-White prejudice” — the belief   “that Whites have replaced Blacks as the primary victims of discrimination.” Participants were asked about their perceptions of discrimination against Blacks and against Whites in each decade going back to the 1950s. Here are the results:

The claim by Norton and Somers that Whites view discrimination as a zero sum game is based solely on the fact that the lines in the above chart cross:  perceptions of Black discrimination against Whites have risen as perceptions of White discrimination against Blacks have fallen.  But to say that this implies that Whites see discrimination as a zero sum game is a non-sequitur, since the curves could be going in opposite directions for quite different reasons. (As all first-year psychology students are aware, correlation does not imply causality.) As indicated below, there are very real reasons why Whites feel discriminated against increasingly in recent decades, and this is likely independent of the reality that there is demonstrably less discrimination against Blacks.

A paper like this published in a first rate academic journal has to follow certain ground rules. The authors imply that Whites’ belief in anti-White discrimination is irrational because “by nearly any metric—from employment to police treatment, loan rates to education—statistics continue to indicate drastically poorer outcomes for Black than White Americans.” This comment fits well with the general the general tenor of the comments by several academics (including Norton and Somers) invited by the NYTimes: Yes indeed there is discrimination against Whites via well-publicized affirmative action cases, but Whites are still dramatically better off than Blacks, so get over it. Read more

Forget the Rhino, save the White man

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In the 1980’s in South Africa there was a saying, “F*** the rhino and save the White man.” Given the turn of events in South Africa, it appears that the fate of the rhino and the Whites are probably intertwined.

The history of rhino hunting parallels the changes in attitude of Whites and their power in the world. In the 1800’s Whites were aggressive in their pursuit of power and in hunting animal species. However by the end of that century, people were waking up to the fact there were limits to the earth and that we shouldn’t destroy, but rather build up that which was worth preserving. Frederick Selous, the famous East African hunter, turned to conservation, and Paul Kruger in South Africa promoted the idea of conservation and set aside land for what became the nucleus of the Kruger National Park.

Rhino herds began to be preserved and their numbers grew. This became self-sustaining with the growth of tourism. By 1994, at least in South Africa, there were large numbers (over 30000) of rhino in the parks and their conservation seemed assured in South Africa.

Since then, however, their future is no longer assured. Poachers are now regularly killing Rhinos. A combination of poachers enticed by easy gains and the large oriental mafias that supply the endless Eastern desire for aphrodisiacs have put the Rhinos under threat. As the ability for Whites to set the agenda in South Africa declined, so has the ability to protect the rhino. The future of the Rhino in South Africa is uncertain, but the same can be said of the Whites.

In many ways the future of the Whites in Africa parallel the history of the Bushmen in Africa.

The Bushmen are now called the Khoisan in PC circles. However I will use Bushmen out of respect, as Khoisan literally means “men-thieves and murderers.” The Bushmen are possibly the original humans. They occupied virtually the whole of Africa. From the Cape to Cairo they were the dominant group. Their presence can be seen in the rock paintings present from the cape all the way to Egypt.

The Bushmen had a universalistic view of the world. There was no individual ownership of land. Land belonged to the tribe and the ancestors. When they hunted the animals some groups would apologise to the animals that they had to kill them for food. Read more