Extreme Sports as a Context of Implicit Whiteness

/104 Comments/in , /by

A reader sent along this video of Jeb Corliss, an extreme athlete, flying through the Alps.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWfph3iNC-k

Here’s extreme surfer Laird Hamilton surfing waves so big that he has to be towed into the path of the wave.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYQQtxb8wv0&feature=related

Corliss and Hamilton are White, and being White seems to be part of a pattern for extreme athletes. The reader also sent a link for Revolt of the White Athlete: Race, Media, and the Emergence of  Extreme Athletes in Amerca (2007), an academic book on the phenomenon which is predictably bogged down with words like ‘interrogate’ (as in “interrogating the racial, gender, and nationalistic aspects of Generation X discourse) and using ‘privilege’ as a verb (as in a complaint about a scholar who [Gasp!] “implicitly privileged the contributions, perspectives and interests of white men over and against all others”).

The author is Kyle Kusz who was rewarded for his efforts by being nominated for the Multicultural Center Diversity Award at the University of Rhode Island where he teaches. Kusz notes that he was inspired to enter the field of cultural aspects of sports by taking a sport sociology class taught by Dr. Stephen Mosher at Ithaca college.

What we have here is a clear case of implicit Whiteness, but of course Kusz takes a typical cultural Marxist attitude towards his subject.

Extreme athletics is where “white everymen perform supra-normal athletic feats in high-risk sporting activities like BASE jumping and sky surfing. Extreme sports are also portrayed as sporting activities which have revived a sense of traditional American masculine values and pursuits: rugged individualism, conquering new frontiers, and achieving individual progress” (p. 63). Predictably, for Kusz, engaging in such sports by Whites is the politics of backlash and resentment that “attempt to deny the racialized privileges of whites while masking (and thus ensuring the reproduction of) asymmetrical relations of power in the present. [They are also an attempt] to reverse the minimal gains made by historically marginalized groups since the 1960s” (p. 69).

BASE jumper jumping off a building

Read more

The Southern Point: Bardic Dynamic, Pt. 2

/18 Comments/in , /by

Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way – Emanuel Leutze

“The study of literature is hero-worship. It is a refinement, or, if you will, a perversion of that primitive religion.”

Ezra Pound, from The Spirit of Romance

The Bardic Dynamic focuses on the magnetic relationship between a speaker and an audience and the communication of a fundamental series of ideas. Traditional examples of this can be found in the great epic poems of Western Civilization. Ezra Pound believed that before about 1750 or so, the quintessence of Western man could only be found in poetry (Pound, 31). The context of these older texts is often an address made by one who remembers to those who may have forgotten. The bard or poet was the “keeper of memories.” This is a very different conception than that which has developed in contemporary times with the hip-hop rapper and his thousand miles a minute ebonicspeak, backed with heavy bass beats or the coffee-house Ginsberg wanna-be railing against, well, against G.I. Joe Whitey, of course. Who else? Read more

Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism and the Decline of Western Art, Part 3

/49 Comments/in , , /by

Abstract Expressionism and the Culture of Critique

Abstract Expressionism was disproportionately a Jewish cultural phenomenon. It was a movement populated by legions of Jewish artists, intellectuals and critics. Prominent non-Jewish artists within the movement like Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell married Jewish women (Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler). Willem de Kooning defied the trend, although he generally had to ingratiate himself with the overwhelmingly Jewish intellectual and cultural elite focused around the journal Partisan Review which was ‘dominated by editors and contributors with a Jewish ethnic identity and a deep alienation from American cultural and political institutions.’[i]

It was an art movement where the culture of critique of Jewish artists and intellectuals, frustrated that the post-war American prosperity based on Keynesian foundations had prevented the coming of socialism, turned inward and instead “proposed individualistic modes of liberation.” This mirrored the ideological shift that occurred among the New York Intellectuals generally who had “gradually evolved away from advocacy of socialist revolution toward a shared commitment to anti-nationalism and cosmopolitanism, ‘a broad and inclusive culture’ in which cultural differences were esteemed.”[ii] Doss notes how this ideological shift manifested itself among the post-war artists who became the Abstract Expressionists:

As full employment returned, New Deal programs were terminated — including federal support for the arts — the reformist spirit that had flourished in the 1930s dissipated. Corporate liberalism triumphed: together, big government and big business forged a planned economy and engineered a new social contract based on free market expansion… With New Deal dreams of reform in ruins, and the better “tomorrow” prophesied at the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair having seemingly led only to the carnage of World War II, it is not surprising that post-war artists largely abandoned the art styles and political cultures associated with the Great Depression.[iii]

The avant-garde artists of the New York School instead embraced an “inherently ambiguous and unresolved, an open-ended modern art … which encouraged liberation through personal, autonomous ‘acts’ of expression.” The works of the Abstract Expressionists were “revolutionary attempts” to liberate the larger American culture “from the alienating conformity and pathological fears [especially of communism] that permeated the post-war era.”[iv] Rothko claimed that “after the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb you couldn’t paint figures without mutilating them.” His friend Barnett Newman remarked that if people only read his paintings properly “it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism.”[v] Read more

Jews at US Colleges and Universities

/115 Comments/in /by

Reform Judaism has posted a chart listing the top 60 colleges and universities attended by Jews. See here. Six of the 8 Ivy League universities are included, with Jewish enrollments of around 25% of the total undergraduates.

The topic of Jewish overrepresentation at elite universities has been discussed several times at TOO. See, e.g.,  Edmund Connelly’s “Harvard Hates Whites“,  Trudie Pert’s “Post Genome Princeton” and my “Jewish overrepresentation at elite universities explained.” Princeton is especially interesting because it is not among the Ivy League universities highest Jewish enrollment. From “Jewish overrepresentation at elite universities explained“:

One might simply suppose that [Jewish overrepresentation] is due to higher Jewish IQ. However, on the basis of Richard Lynn’s estimates of Ashkenazi Jewish IQ and correcting for the greater numbers of European Whites, the ratio of non-Jewish Whites to Jews should be around 7 to 1 (IQ >130) or  4.5 to 1 (IQ > 145). Instead, the ratio of non-Jewish Whites to Jews is around 1 to 1 or less. (See here.) …

These data strongly suggest that Jewish overrepresentation at elite universities has nothing to do with IQ but with discrimination against non-Jewish White Americans, especially those from the working class or with rural origins. It would be interesting to see the dynamics of the admissions process. How many admissions officers are Jewish? And, whether or not they are Jewish,what pressures are they under to admit Jewish students? The brouhaha that engulfed the Princeton campus because Jews were “only” overrepresented by around 6.5 times their percentage of the population suggests that there is considerable pressure for high levels of Jewish admission. The Daily Princetonian ran four front-page articles on the topic, and the New York Times ran an article titled “The Princeton Puzzle.” (See here;  the NYTimes article is here.) Clearly anything less than 20% Jewish enrollment would be met with raised eyebrows and perhaps intimations of anti-Semitism. Read more

Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism and the Decline of Western Art, Part 2

/124 Comments/in , , , /by

Creating a new “American” Art

Before the rise of Abstract Expressionism, the American art scene after World War I was defined by two main currents. The first were what one might call the Regionalists (e.g. Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry) who used their own signature styles to portray the virtues of the hard-working rural American population. In the second group were the artists of Social Realism (e.g. Ben Shahn and Diego Rivera), whose work reflected urban life during the Great Depression, and reflected a preoccupation with international socialism.

Neither of these two schools was interested in abstract art. Despite the leftwing view of the social realists, both groups held rather conservative attitudes on figurative representation. Yet, even as these two styles dominated, the artists of the nascent New York School “met frequently at the legendary Cedar Bar, where they discussed their radical theses. They argued endlessly about the problems of art, about how to effect a total break with the art of the past, about the mission of creating an abstract art that no longer had anything to do with conventional techniques and motifs.”[i]

Spring in the Country by Grant Wood (1941)

The Museum of Modern Art did not yet exist; the Metropolitan Museum tended to “look down its WASP patrician nose at modernism”; and the Whitney favoured exactly the kind of American painting young Rothko most despised: scenic, provincial, anecdotal, and conservative.[ii] For a Jewish outsider like Rothko, who in 1970 declared that he would never feel entirely at home in a land to which he had been transplanted against his will, urban America was his America.

Read more

Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism and the Decline of Western Art, Part 1

/92 Comments/in , , /by

The life and career of Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko is a prototypical Jewish story that encapsulates a range of themes discussed at The Occidental Observer. Central to Rothko’s story is the political radicalism of eastern European Jewish migrants arriving in the United States between 1880 and 1920; the reflexive hostility of these migrants and their descendents to the traditional people and culture of their new homeland, and how this hostility was reflected in the artistic and intellectual currents that dominated Western societies during the twentieth century. Rothko’s story also exemplifies other familiar themes including: the force of Jewish ethnic networking and nepotism in promoting Jewish interests, and the tendency for Jewish “genius” to be constructed by the Jewish intellectual establishment as self-appointed gatekeepers of Western culture.

With Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko has been accorded a leading place in the ranks of the Abstract Expressionists. If there is such a thing as a cult artist among the liberal Jewish intelligentsia, then Rothko is probably it. Important people stand in grave silence before his empty expanses with looks on their faces that bespeak lofty thoughts. As a critic for The Times noted:

Rothko evokes all that could be criticized as most pretentious, most clannish, most pseudish about his spectators. They stand there gravely perusing something that to the outsider probably looks more like a patch of half-stripped wallpaper than a picture and then declare themselves profoundly moved. And many outsiders will start to wonder if they are being duped, if this Modernist emperor actually has no clothes on and his fans are just the blind followers of some aesthetic faith. Read more

FSSPX and the One-Sided Relation of the Vatican with the Jews

/70 Comments/in /by

The discussions between the Pius X-Brotherhood (FSSPX) and the Vatican are drawing to an end and never has FSSPX been so close to a full reunion. The possible reconciliation between the Vatican and FSSPX is making the Jews very nervous.

The relationship between FSSPX and the Jews was already hostile before the Williamson affair in 2009. In 2006 FSSPX was accused of anti-Semitism in a report on Traditional Catholicism by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) (see also here). The allegations include Holocaust-denial, spreading of conspiracy theories about Jewish domination and negative stereotyping of jews. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has branded FSSPX as being “mired in antisemitism.”  FSSPX is negative about the French revolution and its republican ideals and is positively inclined towards the Vichy Regime (1940–1944), which was strongly Catholic and imposed anti-Jewish policies in France. FSSPX officially has no political affiliations, but there are strong links with leading members of the National Front, like Marine Le Pen.

FSSPX is basically a protest-movement within the Roman-Catholic Church, founded by the late Mgr. Lefebvre in 1970 as a reaction to the outcome of Vatican II. According to FSSPX, Vatican II has led to the dominance of the cultural left in the Church and important breaches with tradition, especially the Holy Mass. Vatican II has led to a more positive official attitude towards Jews: “Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God.” The prayer for the conversion of the Jews on Good Friday was dropped.

This one-sided outreach towards Jews has until now not been met by similar gestures from the Jewish side, despite persistent insulting religious texts against Christ (and Christianity). In 2007 Cardinal Francis George of the Archdiocese of Chicago had the courage to bring op this topic with a call of a more two-sided approach, mentioning as particularly offensive “descriptions of Jesus as a “bastard.”

It does work both ways. Maybe this is an opening to say, “Would you care to look at some of the Talmudic literature’s description of Jesus as a bastard, and so on, and maybe make a few changes in some of that?” Read more