“Miserable distorted block-heads, the generality; ape-faces, imp-faces, angry dog-faces, heavy sullen ox-faces; degraded underfoot perverse creatures, sons of indocility, greedy mutinous darkness, and in one word, of STUPIDITY, which is the general mother of such. Stupidity intellectual and stupidity moral had born this progeny: base-natured beings on whom the Genius of Darkness (called Satan, Devil and other names) had now visibly impressed his seal, and had marked them out as soldiers of Chaos and of him … Him, you could perceive, they would serve; but not easily other than him.
Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamplets, No.2.

It’s a little over seven years since I last set foot in Portland, Oregon, and I must say that none of the events in the city during the last 12 months have surprised me. Having spent most of my formative years growing up in some of the coldest, wettest, and cloudiest corners of Northwestern Europe, my first introduction to the United States came just as I turned 21. I was an extremely pale young lad with a soft spot for icy landscapes, and my travel history to that point hadn’t taken me any further south in the hemisphere than Paris. It probably wasn’t the best idea, then, for me to choose the South in Summer for my first landing on American soil. Today, I struggle to remember precisely what I did in the first weeks of my arrival in the Carolinas, other than wrestle with periodic bouts of heat exhaustion, puzzling over whether grits were something marvelous or truly monstrous, and wondering if you required special training to be able to reel off the side effects so quickly in these many strange American pharmaceutical ads. After these initial weeks of acclimatisation, however, I must say that I grew to love the South quite deeply, and still do. I travelled the length of both Carolinas, Georgia, some of Tennessee, and into the parts of Florida normally left peacefully undisturbed by tourists. I now regard it, second only to Europe, as my home. I think it was about 10 months into my first spell in the States that it was suggested that I fly “out West” to help the mother of a friend pack furniture and finish the sale of a house so she could relocate permanently back to the South, where she’d been born and raised. There was a small amount of cash to be earned in the process, and some free room and board, as well as the opportunity to see another side of America. “Where out West?”, I asked. “Washington,” my friend replied, “right down by the Columbia River, but we’ll be staying in Portland.”

I’d been living and studying just outside a very genteel Southern college town, where clean, pressed khakis and short-sleeved button down shirts were the almost compulsory attire. Race wasn’t something that was impressed upon me physically where I’d grown up, because non-Whites were rare to non-existent, but I do remember being very aware that the place I now lived was, for all intents and purposes, racially segregated. In this little satellite village orbiting the main college town, I don’t think a single Black person owned or rented a home. In fact, the only non-White I ever saw in my own neighbourhood was the Oriental, and impossibly young, wife of the extremely seedy-looking elderly man who lived next door. In the college town, Blacks clustered in a few blocks thick with poorly maintained homes and trash-strewn streets. My daily commute was through this area, and although it seemed almost deserted during the day, occasional news reports of rape, robbery, and shootings would always bring a sober reminder of the nocturnal danger it posed. Outside such occurrences, Blacks could be expected to staff most of the town’s fast food restaurants, and a few could be spotted as security officers in the local mall, at least before it went bust around 2009. I can’t honestly report any bad experiences with any of them, and, observing and noting all of this, I remember thinking, as a more or less neutral arrival from Europe, that segregation of this nature largely “worked.”

I’m not suggesting that the lives of the Blacks were in some way marvelous, or even implying that they somehow should have been. But I do remember coming to the conclusion that a sense of peace was abroad in my part of the state simply because people were “keeping to their own,” and that things were existing in large part as they were meant to. True, there was occasional violence in the bad part of town, but outside of that, in daylight, there was a unspoken code of lingering tradition, manners, respect, and expectation. Men held doors for women in stores and restaurants, and even when I spent some weekends touring yard sales in remote rural areas in the hopes of finding something interesting in someone’s else’s junk, there was unfailingly a tremendous sense of safety, good-humor, and adventure with everyone I met. From the woman who simply “had” to introduce me to her daughter because the child’s name was Ireland (yes, I know), to the old veteran who gave me binoculars he’d carried through Burma just because I mentioned I came from a military family, the people of the South charmed me just as much as the landscape.

All of this was, in some small sense, surprising. It’s probably a given that Americans are raised with visions of the South as a highly racialized place, rife with injustice and violence. What is probably less understood by Americans is the fact that Europeans (and presumably all Westerners) are indoctrinated by their education systems to see the South in the same way. My childhood and early college education on American history, not to mention what had been absorbed via TV documentaries and movies like Mississippi Burning, had been more or less limited to the Ku Klux Klan, Emmett Till, and the sainthood and martyrdom of a heavily sanitized version of Martin Luther King. The people of the South could also be relied upon to be caricatured or worse by Jewish Hollywood in such shows as The Beverley Hillbillies, or in horror/thrillers like Deliverance or Wrong Turn, which invariably portrayed White rural Southerners to the world as stupid, childish, inbred, dysgenic, animalistic, and murderous. Added to this propaganda is a kind of “tourism block” that only serves to heighten ignorance. When most Europeans travel to America for vacations, especially family vacations, these trips are inevitably to the more global cities of New York, Orlando, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. I don’t have a single European friend who’s spent more than a layover in the South, and all of this only reinforces the general ignorance and propagandized vision. Contrarian by nature, I never expected the South to fit the Hollywood smears, but I do recall feeling a kind of refreshing shock that it was so radically different from the propaganda.

I’ve found it very interesting that, despite the many hundreds of thousands of words in mainstream coverage on America’s recent racial unrest, and despite the relevant and obvious historical contexts, hardly anything has been said on how relatively quiet the South has been. This is not to say that some protests and vandalism haven’t been witnessed, but that they pale in comparison to events seen in Wisconsin, and especially to those seen in Portland and other (often predominantly White) northern cities. Why this disparity exists is surely of some importance, and the silence around it is surely evidence of some mainstream discomfort regarding the conclusions one might reach. For my own part, I’ve engaged in a mixture of objective thought and personal recollection, certainly as regards the woeful Portland.

Objectively, it seems to me that the disruption of the Civil Rights movement between the 1950s and 1980s in the South led to a solidified state of unspoken, uneasy, but for the most part peaceful racial compromise. Segregation is certainly publicly and officially prohibited, but in my experience the Southerners more than any other people in America have perfected, if not White flight, then a kind of White entrenchment. For those Whites unfortunate enough to be poor, the Southern public schools have undoubtedly been catastrophically ruined by integration. A little over a decade ago, I got to know a North Carolina family with three sons. The older two had been through the public school system and emerged as rap-loving delinquents who spoke in an Africanized dialect quite distinct from that of their Carolina-born father and New Jersey-born mother. Both boys had been subjected to violence and theft from their predominantly Black fellow students, their subsequent changes in personality and behaviour being an obvious example of conscious or unconscious adaptation in order to survive. The experience of these unfortunate boys was sufficiently heartbreaking for the parents to make it their over-arching goal that, no matter the financial sacrifices, the youngest lad would get a private, and of course overwhelmingly White, education. Their frankness in regards to matters of race, especially to a complete stranger like myself, was refreshing and rather emblematic of the Southern experience as a whole. In my view, at least, there is a realism to Southern approaches to race that persists, although it dare not speak its name. Whites in the South seemed to me to be instinctively informed by race in a very natural and subtle manner, while Southern Blacks for the most part seemed to carry a healthy imprint of history and an awareness that while Jim Crow has been rendered toothless it’s best not to poke him too hard.

Contrast this deft sense of cultural equilibrium with the chaos of Portland, something that’s hardly surprising to anyone who’s been to the city. My own introduction to Portland was rather abrupt. My friend and I, being cheap college students, had flown out of Raleigh, NC, and landed at Portland’s PDX after two lengthy layovers in Houston and San Francisco. I’d already been told to “dress down” (and warmer!) for my time in Portland, and decided to travel in comfort with some jeans and a hooded Led Zeppelin sweatshirt I’d bought about a week before. I didn’t think anything more about my clothing until I was going to collect my suitcase in PDX, when a fat middle-aged woman wearing sweatpants barged towards me shouting “Name me two fucking Zeppelin songs!” In retrospect she was probably some kind of old groupie who resented the historicized commercialism that bands like Zeppelin and Black Sabbath had fallen into — not to mention the youngsters who wore merchandise without having “lived” 70s hedonism in the way she had. Stunned into silence by her utter boorishness, however, I couldn’t even verbalise the song titles that popped into my head. I just stared at her and in an instant she was gone. “Welcome to Portland!,” laughed my friend.

It wasn’t long before I realized I’d stumbled down a social and cultural rabbit hole. My friend’s mother, it emerged that first evening, was a (modest) donor to the SPLC, something I learned when looking for something to read, only to be handed, in what is surely now an irony of ironies, a copy of Intelligence Report. One of three daughters born into a conservative Republican Carolina family, this woman had rebelled in the early 70s, moving out West to become what her father would later describe as “a damn Oregon hippy.” It struck me very quickly that if anyone wanted to be a damn hippy, Portland was probably the right place to be. She’d arrived in Portland to fulfil her ambition of being a counsellor or therapist, falling in love with one of her clients, a recovering heroin addict who would go on to establish a very successful Portland business before dying of Hepatitis C, contracted during his former needle use, in his early 50s. Now, with her parents ailing, this ageing, “anti-racist” Portland hippy and widow was returning to the South and I — a young European with a hardening Far Right worldview — was helping with the big move.

Also helping with the move, I’d been briefly told, were a couple from central Portland, long-time friends of the widow. From their names nothing seemed amiss, but as we met for breakfast I was rather stunned to see that the individual with the male name was in fact an overweight lesbian in her 50s, wearing on her hands what appeared to be pink gloves for washing dishes. In fact, the peculiar couple were almost identical, both in their physical make-up and in the wearing of the incongruous gloves, which remained, much to my perplexed fascination, on their hands for the duration of the breakfast and for the rest of the three days it took to pack most belongings and sell the rest via a yard sale (where I was told to “eat shit and die” by an anorexic goth for refusing to haggle lower than a few dollars for an item that now escapes my memory). Things got progressively stranger as I took time to explore Portland. As the days passed by, it seemed to me that all of Hollywood’s characterizations of the Southern people as stupid, childish, and dysgenic would have been more appropriately applied to many of the denizens of Portland, whose physiognomy was as startling to me then as it now is to anyone following Andy Ngo’s Twitter account (or who clicks on #portlandmugshots), and whose lives resembled something from a Bukowski poem but without the latter’s redeeming pathos.

One thing I noted early in my stay in the city was the quite radical attachment of the city’s young to a need for some sense of superficial or aesthetic differentiation. In contrast to my experience in the South, in Portland a motley of exotic hair dyes, piercings, tattoos, clothing, and make-up were widely employed by goths, transvestites, and numerous unheard of, and possibly un-named, subcultures. On Day Two or Three of my stay, my friend and I heard that a young female relative of his was about to undergo scarification, a process where shapes or designs are carved into the skin with a surgical knife in such a way that the resulting scar will resemble a kind of morbid tattoo. We arranged to meet with the girl in question, who proceeded to show me a tattoo of a “nebula” on her calf that made the otherwise attractive young woman look like she’d survived some tragic accident. Even aside from my new pink-gloved associates, the city appeared replete with all manner of sexual identities. Scar Girl was, she proudly announced, a bisexual, and had also attached herself to the city’s underground burlesque scene, where the morbidly obese and the handicapped would parade their abundant or mortified flesh in the name of “body positivity.” My friend and I politely declined an offer to attend one of these events, but were happy to take up her offer to take us on a brief tour of the city, which consisted, at its lowest point, of a tour of the various stores selling drug-taking paraphernalia, and yet also of such highlights as the magnificent Japanese garden.

I asked myself — had the city ruined the people, or had people ruined the city? A long-time resident would be better placed to answer that than me. In either case, there’s an argument to be made that once a city establishes a certain reputation, that reputation can be hard to escape from. Decent people can be deterred from moving to the area, while untold numbers of misfits come in their floods in expectation of human acceptance and cultural chaos. Judging from Andy Ngo’s revelations about the city’s Antifa arrestees, the city is now a kind of Satanic black hole, drawing in via demonic gravity every pedophile, sodomite, transvestite, meth-head, and revolutionary Jew in its vicinity (incidentally, the city’s Jewish population doubled between 2001 and 2011).

Portland, for whatever reason, and for however long, had gradually come to see itself, and be seen, as a city proud of progressivism and difference for the sake of progressivism and difference. Almost 80% White, with a Black population of less than 6% and falling, Portland is the “Whitest big city in America.” In fact, the only significant number of Blacks I ever saw in Portland were inside the Lloyd Center movie theater, where, with only a handful of Whites at one particular showing, they chattered and hooted with stereotypical animation all the way through the film I was unsuccessfully attempting to watch. In the absence of significant numbers of Blacks and other exemplars of diversity, the city’s unaccountable and unhinged drive for “difference” has thus long been internalized into myriad pathologies — predominantly sexual, psychological, and political. I vividly remember one day going to Goodwill to look for old blankets that could be used for covering furniture and packing goods. As I neared the appropriate section of the store, I saw a young White, very Nordic, but hippyish-looking couple with the arms filled with almost every blanket the store had. I thought they might have a similar use in mind until a passerby asked them “Sweat lodge?” They nodded and smiled. It was only later, when recounting the story to my friend’s mother, that I was told that the city and its surroundings had a not insignificant subculture that involved Whites engaging with Native American spiritualities, participating in sweat lodges, Sun Dances, and even adopting new, and in my view hilariously pretentious, names like Ghost Horse and Running Wind. Just another symptom, I thought, of the inability of Portland to be content with itself and its authentic past.

Exclusive: I have unmasked the identity of the #antifa member who was filmed using mace in an attack on a conservative pro-@PortlandPolice rally last week. Isabel Rosa Araujo, formerly Philip Vincent Haskins-Delici, has called for comrades to kill me. https://t.co/VkTFR8VphW

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) November 24, 2020

Ya gotta feel sorry for someone like this. Doesn’t fit in as a man and now is a very unattractive, very weird woman, likely with psychiatric issues. But his/her/their reaction is to hate everything that’s functional, that’s beautiful. There’s an awful lot of that on the left. https://t.co/PSPvrbxmRz

— Kevin MacDonald (@TOOEdit) November 26, 2020

An excellent test case for theories of “White pathology,” Portland now distinguishes itself in its role as America’s most politically violent city. About seven years ago I wrote an article for The Occidental Quarterly on Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion. In the aftermath of the rebellion, which saw Whites massacred wholesale in the most brutal fashion imaginable, London’s Exeter Hall-based anti-slavery society issued numerous proclamations blaming the White inhabitants for the fact they were now having their eyes gouged out. Charles Dickens would later condemn Exeter Hall for their ill-informed and delusional “platform sympathy with the Black—or the Native, or the Devil—afar off, and that platform indifference to our own countrymen at enormous odds in the midst of bloodshed and savagery.” I wrote the essay shortly after an unrelated later trip to Portland, and the city was certainly in my mind when I wrote it. Like many Portlanders, the members of Exeter Hall had little to no meaningful experience with Black or non-White populations, and were thus free to entertain all manner of fantasies about human universalism and human rights, as well as self-aggrandising notions of moral superiority. These fantasies, stewing the minds of the deranged, are now driving chronic violence.

At last some of this can be interpreted as a backfiring of the ambition of the Oregon founders to create a White utopia. When the state entered the union in 1859, it became the only state to prohibit Blacks from living in its borders, and by the 1920s Portland, and Oregon as a whole, was an important northwestern hub for the Ku Klux Klan. It worked extremely well for a considerable time, but, unlike the South where racial realities remained ever present, as generations passed in the predominantly White northwest, memory of the founders’ rationale slowly dissolved, and the same fantasies that occupied Exeter Hall were able to incubate and metastasise. Combined with the insidious intellectual movements of the 1960s counter-culture, Portland gradually produced a witches’ brew of mental pathology, sexual deviance, cultural amnesia, nihilistic anarchism, and acute social decay. In short, my foremost recollection of Portland is of a city that forgot itself.

Ashland, Oregon, 1920s

If there is a moral to Portland’s story, it’s the importance of retaining and reviving the history of one’s people. We live in an age where cultural amnesia is encouraged, and where we are told that it is a moral necessity to forget a shameful past and race headlong into the “progressive” future. Portland shows where this amnesia and “progressive” future actually leads — degeneration, degradation, and swift collapse. The city is a kaleidoscope of the macabre; an asylum run by the inmates. It attracts the demonic and repels the decent, who must shake sinister dust from their feet on leaving. The South, meanwhile, “remembers,” which is why, infused with vast numbers of Blacks, it continues to produce White populations worthy of the name. The South may well rise again — certainly before Portland does.

“Eyes Wide Shut,” released in 1999, was the last film of the legendary director Stanley Kubrick. He died of a heart attack six days after he submitted the final cut of the film to the film studio.  Kubrick’s other films include “The Killing” (1956), “Paths of Glory” (1957), “Spartacus” (1960), “Lolita” (1962); “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964), “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), “A Clockwork Orange” (1971), “Barry Lyndon” (1975), “The Shining” (1980), and “Full Metal Jacket” (1987).  A most impressive list.   While I’m sure “Eyes Wide Shut” was a seriously intended expression, and by all accounts Kubrick gave it his best effort, it doesn’t contribute positively to his oeuvre.

At least ostensibly, “Eyes Wide Shut” is an erotic drama Kubrick produced, directed, and co-wrote with American-born British resident Frederick Raphael, starring Tom Cruise and his wife at the time, Nicole Kidman.   It is based on the 1926 novella Traumnoville (Dream Story) by Arthur Schnitzler.  Kubrick and Raphael changed the setting of the story from early twentieth-century Vienna to contemporary New York City.   The film follows the—again, ostensibly–sexually charged night of medical doctor Bill Harford (Cruise).  It includes his infiltrating a masked orgy by a secret society and the apparent murder of a woman attendee.  The film grossed $162M world-wide, a very good return.  “Eyes Wide Shut” is widely available now for purchase and streaming.  It has its admirers and has become something of a cult film in recent years.

In the late ‘90s, “Eyes Wide Shut” received a great deal of attention in the media, both while in production and after its release, because of Kubrick’s excellent reputation and Cruise and Kidman’s association with the film. The pre-release media coverage was extended—the 400-day shooting schedule is the longest in film history.   Kubrick was known for his multiple takes—up to a hundred for a scene.  Harford’s encounter with a prostitute early in his roaming night—incidentally, the one good thing in the film—about seven minutes of screen time, took Kubrick two weeks to shoot.

Critics’ responses to the film at the time were mixed, though none of them was as scathingly negative as I’ll be here.  I saw “Eyes Wide Shut” when it came out and remember being disappointed after all the hype and almost completely unaffected by it; it stayed “over there,” it didn’t engage me.  I saw it again about ten days ago and this time, indeed, it was “right here” and not in a good way; I found it stunningly bad.  Words that come to mind include artless, coarse, contrived, sophomoric, undisciplined, and vulgar.  For all its sex talk, sexual situations, and nudity and couplings, this film curiously lacks eroticism.  While I found its merits wanting to say the least, “Eyes Wide Shut” intrigued me enough in my second viewing to spend a good a deal of time thinking about it, reading about it online—reviews, analyses and such–and going through co-writer Raphael’s memoir about his experience with Kubrick during the development of the screenplay (Eyes Wide Open, Ballantine Books, 1999).

Why all this attention from me to this bad film?  Because I speculate that “Eyes Wide Shut” may have been a watershed in our collective life, a turning point, an historical moment in the core culture.   It may have set the stage for, paved the way to, pointed the direction to, legitimized, what is going on now in center-stage mass entertainment taken seriously by critics and the informed—or perhaps better, pseudo-informed—public.  I’ll give over the next paragraphs to fleshing out that assertion and invite you to add your own best thinking to what I offer.  To orient you to what’s coming up, the last word in “Eyes Wide Shut,” and thus the last word in Kubrick’s directing career, is “fuck.”

*    *    *

Kubrick

I’ll begin by recounting how I came to watch “Eyes Wide Shut.”  I had streamed the 1967 French film “Belle de Jour” starring Catherine Deneuve and really liked it and was looking for a next film with that same theme.  “Belle de Jour” deals with sexuality and is about a young woman who spends afternoons as a high-class prostitute while her medical doctor husband is at work.  It was directed by the renowned director Luis Buñuel (“Un Chien Andalou,” “The Exterminating Angel,” and “The Obscure Object of Desire”), who co-wrote the screenplay with French writer Jean-Claude Carriere.   I found “Belle de Jour” the opposite of what I later found objectionable about “Eyes Wide Shut”: it is artful, refined, true, mature, meticulous, and tasteful.  Without any nudity at all, it was highly, and appropriately, erotic.

Looking around for a “next film” after “Belle de Jour, I read reviews of “Eyes Wide Shut,” and it seemed to be a good choice.   The late Roger Ebert in his review when the film came out in 1999 wrote:

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman star as Dr. Bill and Alice Harford, a married couple who move in rich Manhattan society. In a long, languorous opening sequence, they attend a society ball where a tall Hungarian, a parody of a suave seducer, tries to honey-talk Alice (“Did you ever read the Latin poet Ovid on the art of love?”). Meanwhile, Bill gets a come-on from two aggressive women, before being called to the upstairs bathroom, where Victor (Sydney Pollack), the millionaire who is giving the party, has an overdosed hooker who needs a doctor’s help.

At the party, Bill meets an old friend from medical school, now a pianist. The next night, at home, Alice and Bill get stoned on pot (apparently very good pot, considering about a young naval officer she saw last summer while she and Bill were vacationing on Cape Cod: “At no time was he ever out of my mind. And I thought if he wanted me, only for one night, I was ready to give up everything.” There is a fight. Bill leaves the house and wanders the streets, his mind inflamed by images of Alice making love with the officer. And now begins his long adventure, which has parallels with Joyce’s Ulysses in Nighttown and Scorsese’s “After Hours,” as one sexual situation after another swims into view.

New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin concluded: 

This is a dead-serious film about sexual yearnings, one that flirts with ridicule yet sustains its fundamental eeriness and gravity throughout. The dreamlike intensity of previous Kubrick visions is in full force here, in an adaptation of a 1926 Viennese novella that is stark and haunting in its own right.  In Arthur Schnitzler’s ”Dream Story,” which the film follows with such surprising ease that its New York has a grandly Viennese flavor, a doctor and his wife are teased apart by sexual jealousy as the husband is drawn into ”a wild, shadowlike succession of gloomy and lascivious adventures, all without an end.”  Step by step, this languorous yet precise film glides into a similarly mysterious realm.

Seeing “Belle de Jour” and “Eyes Wide Shut” back-to-back as I did, prompted me to compare Bunuel and Carriere as people with Kubrick and Raphael under the assumption that the art we create grows out of who we are and where we’ve come from.  Raphael’s memoir made much of his and Kubrick’s Jewishness and the Jewishness of Schnitzler’s novella, the source material of what came to be called “Eyes Wide Shut.”  Examples: “Jews are often real Jews only with each other.  Gentiles never suspect this.”  “SK [Kubrick] has said more than once, ‘What do we know about how Gentiles feel?’  Yet he wants to suppress any overt allusion to Jewishness in our story.  He takes joy in the surreptitious.”  A notable exception to this assertion is the character of Victor Ziegler, who at the end of the film informs Bill Harford (the Cruise character) “how it is.”  The Ziegler name is often Jewish, and he is played by Jewish actor Sydney Pollack, who had replaced another Jewish actor, Harvey Keitel.  This kind of thing, which pervades Raphael’s book, got me thinking about whether the fact that Kubrick and Raphael were Jewish and Buñuel and Carriere were Gentiles contributes to an understanding of the differences between “Belle de Jour” and “Eyes Wide Shut.”  Does a Jewish sensibility infuse “Eyes Wide Shut”?   Raphael’s memoir seems to be saying yes, it does.  I’ll leave it to people who are more ethnically astute than I am to take this angle farther than I am able to.

In any case, it is important to look at who is producing art and entertainment for mass public consumption.  They are teaching us what to attend to and what to make of it and how to be.  In her New York Times review at the time, Michiko Kakutani notes that “Eyes Wide Shut”

 underscores Kubrick’s deeply cynical view of the world, his unaccommodated view of mankind as a species driven to distraction by greed and violence and its own delusions.

Later in her review, she points out that in his films Kubrick has portrayed sex

as an all-consuming obsession (Humbert’s compulsive pursuit of a pubescent girl in ”Lolita”), an uproarious sight-gag (the scene of two planes copulating in ”Dr. Strangelove”) and a brutal violation (the rape scene in ”A Clockwork Orange”), but it has never been depicted as a complex, emotional involvement encompassing love.

Who is depicting the world to us?

*   *   *

I’ve decided that the best way to get across my take on “Eyes Wide Shut” is through the dialogue of its climactic scene, an exchange between millionaire Victor and Dr. Bill. At Victor’s party, Bill’s piano-playing medical school classmate Nick tells him about an upcoming engagement where invitees to secret gatherings wear costumes and masks and must provide a password, which he gives Bill.  Bill rents a costume and mask and takes a taxi to the country mansion location.  He provides the password and enters and discovers a sexual ritual is taking place involving fifteen or twenty masked women, nude except for thongs.  They are virtually identical and resemble large-breasted store manikins.  One of the women warns Bill that he is in terrible danger.

Bill is unmasked by the master of ceremonies and it seems that he is in dire straits; perhaps he will be killed. The woman who warned Bill intervenes and declares she will volunteer to take his undisclosed punishment.  Bill is let off with a warning not to tell anyone about what happened.  The next day, Bill reads an article in the newspaper, “Ex-beauty Queen Dies in Hotel Drug Overdose.”  Could it be?  He goes to the morgue and views the body and is sure that it is the woman who warned him and then took his punishment. It wasn’t drugs; she was murdered, he concludes.  He is then summoned to the lavish residence of Victor; what about, he isn’t told.  This sets up an exchange between Bill and Victor in Victor’s billiards room that provides the denouement of the film.

Before getting into the dialogue between Victor and Bill, a couple of quotes that I deem revealing from Raphael’s memoir.  “Kubrick wanted to show, not tell.  He preferred to leave motive and ‘psychology’ to be divined by the spectator.”  Kubrick disparaging exposition in another film: “Know what they did?  They explained everything.  They told you what everything means.  Killed it.  You tell people what things mean, they don’t mean anything anymore.”  These quotes exemplify what Kubrick and Rafael did throughout their collaboration on the screenplay for “Eyes Wide Shut”—talk a good game and then produce commonplace, even contradictory, results.   See what you think, but to me this scene coming up is the longest, most heavy-handed, meandering, tell-not-show, drama-killing exposition movie scene of all time.  After all the references to Harold Pinter and the eighteenth-century letters of Junius, Kubrick and Raphael produce this rubbish—you and I could write better dialogue than this.   This scene is crude enough that after I typed it up, I went to brush my teeth.

So, millionaire Victor and Doctor Bill in Victor’s billiards room, the big climactic scene.

VICTOR.  Bill, I appreciate you coming.

BILL.  Sure.

VICTOR.  Sorry to drag you out here tonight.  Let me take your coat.

BILL.  No, no.  You know, I was out anyway.  Thank you.

VICTOR.  How about a drink?

BILL.  Are you having one?  Sure.

VICTOR.  OK.  What would you like?

BILL.   Just a little scotch.

VICTOR.  Good.  How do you like it?  Neat?

BILL.  Please.  That was a terrific party the other night.  Alice and I had a wonderful time.

VICTOR.  Well, good, good.  It was great seeing you both.   Cheers.

BILL.  Cheers.  Were you playing [referring to billiards]?

VICTOR.  No, I was just knocking a few balls around.

BILL.  Beautiful scotch.

VICTOR.   That’s a 25-year-old.   I’ll send you a case.  No, please.

BILL.   Sure.  No.

VICTOR.   Why not?

BILL.  No, no, no.

VICTOR.  You, uh, feel like playing?

BILL   No, thanks.  You go ahead.  I’ll watch.

VICTOR.  I enjoyed, uh . . . listen.   Bill, the reason I, uh, asked you to come over tonight is I—I need to talk to you about something,

BILL.  Sure.

VICTOR.  It’s a little bit awkward.  And I have to be completely frank.

BILL.  What kind of problem are you having?

VICTOR.  It isn’t a medical problem.  Actually, it concerns you.  Bill, I –I know what happened last night.  And I know what’s been going on since then.   And I think you just might have a wrong idea about one or two things.

BILL.  I’m sorry, Victor, I, uh . . . what in the hell are you talking about?

VICTOR. Please, Bill, no games.  I was there at the house.  I saw everything that went on.  Bill, what the hell did you think you were doing?  I couldn’t—I couldn’t even imagine how you, how you even heard about it, let alone got yourself in the door.  Then I remembered seeing you with that—that—that prick piano player Nick whatever the fuck his name is at my party.  And it didn’t take much to figure out the rest.

BILL.  It wasn’t Nick’s fault, it was mine.

VICTOR.  Of course it was Nick’s fault.   If he hadn’t mentioned it to you in the first place, none of this would never have happened.  I recommended that little cocksucker to those people and he’s made me look like a complete asshole.

BILL.  Victor, what can I say?  I had absolutely no idea you were involved in any way,

VICTOR.  I know you didn’t, Bill.  But I also know that you went to Nick’s hotel the next morning and talked to the desk clerk.

BILL.  How did you know that?

VICTOR.  Because I had you followed.

BILL.  You had me followed?

VICTOR.  OK, OK.  I’m sorry.  All right?  I owe you an apology.  This was for your own good, believe me.  Now, look, I know what the desk clerk told you. But what he didn’t tell you is all they did was put Nick on a plane to Seattle.  By now, he’s—he’s probably back with his family, you know, banging Mrs. Nick.

BILL.  The clerk said he had a bruise on his face.

VICTOR. OK, he had a bruise on his face.  That’s a hell of a lot less than he deserves.  Listen, Bill, I don’t think you realize the kind of trouble you were in last night.   Who do you think those people were?  Those were not just ordinary people there.  If I told you their names—I’m not gonna tell you their names, but if I did, I don’t think you’d sleep so well.

BILL.  Was it the second password?  [He was asked for a second password and didn’t know it.]

VICTOR.  Yes, finally.  But not because you didn’t know it.  It’s because there was no second password.  Of course, it didn’t help a whole lot that those people arrived in limos and you showed up in a taxi, or that when they took your coat, they found the receipt from the rental house in your pocket made out to you know who.

BILL.  There was a woman there who, uh, tried to warn me.

VICTOR.  I know.

BILL.  Do you know who she was?

VICTOR.   Yes.  She was a hooker.   Sorry, but that’s what she was.

BILL.  A hooker?

VICTOR.  Bill, suppose I told you that everything that happened there, the threats, the—the girl’s warnings, her last-minute intervention—suppose I told you that was all staged.  That it was a kind of charade.  That it was false.

BILL.   False?

VICTOR.  Yes.  False.

BILL.   Why would she do that?

VICTOR.  Why?  In plain words?  To scare the living shit out of you.  To keep you quiet about where you’d been and what you’d seen.

BILL.  Have you seen this? [The newspaper clipping about the hotel death,]

VICTOR.   Yes, I have.

BILL.   I saw her body in the morgue.  Was she the girl at the party?

VICTOR.  Yes.

BILL.  Well, Victor, maybe I’m missing something here.   You called it a fake, a charade.   Do you mind telling me what kind of fucking charade ends with somebody turning up dead?

VICTOR.   OK, Bill, let’s cut the bullshit, all right?  You’ve been way out of your depth for the last twenty-four hours.  You want to know what kind of charade?   I’ll tell you exactly what kind.  That play-acted “take me” phony sacrifice that you’ve been jerking yourself off with had absolutely nothing to do with her death.  Nothing happened to her after you left that party that hadn’t happened to her before.  She got her brains fucked out, period.   When they took her home, she was just fine.  And the rest of it is right there in the paper.  She was a junkie.  She OD’d.   There was nothing suspicious.   Her door was locked from the inside.  The police are happy.   End of story.   Come on.  It was always going to be just a matter of time with her.   You remember?   The one with the great tits who OD’d in my bathroom.  Listen, Bill, nobody killed anybody.   Someone died.   It happens all the time.   But life goes on.   It always does.   Until it doesn’t.  But you know that, don’t you?

*   *   *

Legendary film director Stanley Kubrick’s contribution to the culture.  I’ll leave it here and turn it over to you.  I won’t get into the part about the father prostituting his thirteen-or-fourteen-year-old daughter to two eager middle-aged Asians which made me hit pause.  What do you make of this?  I’m thinking that “Eyes Wide Shut” was a watershed, a harbinger, it set a tone, portended the future, marked a cultural shift, validated a mindset, passed the baton onto a new set of tastemakers, however best to put it.   Is there any validity to this idea, do you think?   How about taking it further than I have, either with this film or some other artistic (or “artistic”) expression, a film or television show, whatever it is.  Really, the only thing that’s come out of this consideration for me is a commitment to do my best to stay clear of creations as base as “Eyes Wide Shut.”  If nothing else, I’ll save on tooth paste, and mouthwash too.

The Transgender-Industrial Complex
Scott Howard
Antelope Hill Publishing
Paperback (447 pages) available through the Antelope Hill website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble

It is certainly apropos that Antelope Hill Publishing moved the announcement of the release of Scott Howard’s debut book The Transgender-Industrial Complex to one of the seemingly-infinite LGBTQ “holidays”—the Transgender Day of Remembrance (November 20^th). The bot or low-level 30-something behind Joe Biden’s official Twitter account proclaimed that:

At least 37 transgender and gender-nonconforming people have been killed this year, most of them Black and Brown transgender women. It’s intolerable. This Transgender Day of Remembrance, we honor their lives—and recommit to the work that remains to end this epidemic of violence

Beyond the fact that we know who is doing the killing in large part, Howard comes out swinging debunking this asinine talking point—and so much more. From the intentional undermining of humans’ sexual dimorphism to the experiments conducted on children, Howard refuses to shy away from any of the hideous aspects of the agenda. Whether it be the overwhelming Jewish influence specifically—perhaps more pronounced here than any other arena, which is saying something—or some of the less-obvious aspects, this book considers it and covers it. It is a comprehensive tome with tremendous detail, but it accomplishes the feat of as the book description states, being “at once wide-ranging and specific, advanced and accessible,” and I agree with this assessment. Howard does an excellent job providing the historical context dating to the fourteenth century for where these ideas come from, as well as fully covering how it has become institutionalized and where it is going and for what ends.

Of the many cogs in this machine is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), so fond of libeling this very publication. They have a recommended LGBTQ reading list for children as young as four, which includes the collaborative effort of Jewish authors Jazz Jennings and Jessica Herthel’s transgender children’s book I Am Jazz. The ADL also produces guidelines for “Toys and Gender” aimed at kindergarteners, and their buddies at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)—who have decided a publication such as The Occidental Quarterly is worthy of a “Hate List” (you know, the kinds of lists people like Jennifer Rubin are so fond of)—proclaims that objections to the Drag Queen Story Hour are evidence of “escalating white nationalist threats against transgender people.” White nationalist, as we all know, is just one of the many buzz words used as a negative to stoke the mob into unthinking hatred of whites who want their own countries and want them free of this poison.

Speaking of white countries, Howard does an impressive job in size and scope covering the agenda well beyond the United States; in fact, I believe if not every European or European-derived nation is covered, then the vast majority, and in great depth in many cases. This is a testament to the research and attention to detail present that the issue is considered both locally from municipalities in Iceland and Andorra to the whole global picture, because, after all, the globalist agenda is just that—global. But it must also destroy every tie that binds from local communities to the family, and Howard not just understands this, but evidences it in great detail. What is particularly impressive, beyond the depth of research, is how seamlessly Howard connects everything; this is a book that would appeal to the most advanced of TOO readers, but could also be given to someone unfamiliar with the issue, where they would be lead from A to Z in a compelling and understandable fashion.

Howard structures and paces the book like a novel, which makes for an extremely engaging read. In so doing, the pay-off in the conclusion—which I won’t spoil here!—is jaw-dropping. There are many such moments in the book, actually, where the true depravity of the ruling class, which is totally on board with this agenda of experimenting on children and literally retarding their development and mutilating and sterilizing them, is on full display. Howard quotes Jill Stark regarding the Gender Dysphoria Clinic introduced to Queen Victoria Hospital by Trudy Kennedy and Herbert Bower, “the only child of Austrian Jewish parents [who] grew up in the Vienna of Freud”:

Patients with psychiatric problems have been wrongly diagnosed as transsexuals and encouraged to have radical gender reassignment surgery. The Sunday Age has been told at least eight former patients of the Gender Dysphoria Clinic at Melbourne’s Monash Medical Centre believe they may have been misdiagnosed. Some have tried to commit suicide while struggling to live as the opposite sex after the irreversible operations. But as the clinic has limited patient follow-up, it is difficult to determine how many patients may have been adversely affected by the surgery…One former patient, “Andrew”, who was 21 when he had his penis and testicles replaced with a false vagina, was awarded damages after claiming Dr Kennedy misdiagnosed him as a transsexual in the late 1980s…Since the surgery, he has twice tried to take his own life and has undergone operations to reconstruct a penis and remove breast implants. He says he will never be able to have children, is unable to work and feels like a “mutilated freak”…Countless patients were given sex changes without proper mental health checks before or after surgery…Dr Kennedy claims the same “political forces” that tried to shut down abortion clinics are trying to close the gender dysphoria facility, which has performed sexual reassignment surgery on more than 600 people—a third of all referrals—since it was founded in 1975 by Dr Kennedy and Austrian-born Dr Herbert Bower.[1]

Like the work of many TOO contributors, Howard (who does cite such authorities as Kevin MacDonald and Andrew Joyce) prefers to use the words of the organizations responsible to show that, despite the inevitable attacks on this book given its subject matter and unwillingness to concede reality, it is not “baseless” by any means. As we’ve seen with the gaslighting about the Great Reset, a conspiracy theory is only the wrong person bringing the right facts to light. Howard does that, and he’s only the “wrong” person insofar as he refuses to compromise with evil. This is commendable.

Another vital element that Howard covers is that the transgender movement would not have been possible without the preceding dominoes of “civil rights,” feminism, and “gay rights.” As he shows in many different contexts, these are always these preceding steps with this particular modus operandi of the ruling class. Thus, we cannot fight transgenderism without fighting the totality of neo-liberalism and, by extension, the system itself. How do we know the system is totally on board with this and that it feeds into their overall transhumanist globalist dystopia? Well, Howard writes in Chapter Nineteen:

In December 2017, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) completed the development of 51 LGBTI Inclusion Index indicators in five strategic inclusion areas for “development efforts that are inclusive of LGBTI people.” The support of the Swedish LGBTQ NGO RFSL, OutRight Action International, and ILGA were instrumental for the completion of these consultations, which were done in partnership with the World Bank. ILGA has UN Economic and Social Council consultative status. Over the course of 2020, OutRight Action International launched the COVID19 Global LGBTIQ Emergency Fund with founding partners Microsoft, Gilead Sciences, Calvin Klein, and the Dunn Family Charitable Foundation, which focuses on “poverty alleviation and social justice globally.” Other contributors to OutRight’s COVID fund include the Open Society Foundations, Salesforce, the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, the Horizons Foundation, Visa, Warner Music Group, PepsiCo, and the Council for Global Equality. We can see how everything is consciously being linked under the auspices of a nebulous “justice” that somehow only benefits these major stakeholders. They can fly to Davos in their private jet, but you have to live in a pod next to forced “diversity” and eat plants and bugs. It’s the only way to stop the apocalypse you know!

 With the frightening moves made by the ruling class this year, this is becoming increasingly obvious, and it will require us to move beyond the political realm—not forsake it, but move beyond it as well—into meta-political considerations, which Howard also acknowledges. If I may take a slight liberty here, understand that Satan is the great deceiver, the inverter of all things. What is transgenderism but the inversion of truth, the lie that men can become women, and women can become men? Or that there is a whole buffet of choose-your-own-adventure/gender/species/whatever for us to choose from? Even if one is not Christian, surely they understand that this is not just deeply unnatural and will lead, as we are seeing, to catastrophic outcomes, but is, in fact, evil? You cannot tell me forcibly sterilizing and mutilating children is compassionate or being done for the good of the child, or humanity, or whatever the thin justifications may be. It is the same with the consequences of “diversity” and the industrial-scale rape and endemic violence. This is being done to us, not for us.

Consider that Johnson & Johnson, one of the major players covered in Howard’s book,  is appealing to the Supreme Court a $2.12 billion damages award in Missouri to women who blamed their ovarian cancer on asbestos in Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder and other products; a 2018 Reuters investigative report that found Johnson & Johnson knew for decades about asbestos in its talc with evidence showing that from at least 1971 to the early 2000s, their powders tested positive for asbestos and were still brought to market. Or that one of the virologists awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for discovering the HIV virus stated that the SARS-CoV-2 virus came from a lab and is the result of an attempt to manufacture a vaccine against the AIDS virus, which intersects with the research presented in Howard’s book regarding the same coronavirus “vaccine” manufacturers efforts along the HIV/AIDS front.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough; in fact, I would go so far as to say that it is one of the most consequential books to come out in a long time, and that it is an authorial debut is all the more impressive. Anyone wanting to understand the state of play and where the ruling class is trying to take us should get this book, and get a copy for friends and family!

[1] Stark, Jill, “Sex-change clinic ‘got it wrong,’” May 31, 2009. The Sydney Morning Herald.