Quantum Dylan: A Double Act, Part 2

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It is doubtful whether Dylan has ever read Wagner’s Judaism in Music — in which it is argued that Jewish musicians are essentially bricoleurs, only capable of “nonsensical gurgling, yodeling and cackling.” Nevertheless, Dylan’s gloriously imperfect and constantly mobile singing voice, and his boundless ability to mix musical styles, eerily correspond to Wagner’s stereotype of ‘the Jew’ as aesthetically and culturally impure.”[1] Dylan’s music is, in Murphy’s words, “littered with tiny rippling echoes of this giant national storehouse of folk ballads, hymns, Civil War songs, country folk blues, urban electric blues, country and western, bluegrass, dust-bowl folk, tin-pan alley, Broadway, gospel, jazz-beat, crooning, Tex-Mex, big band, rhythm and blues, pop music, reggae, rap — and all the rest.”[2]

Dylan freely appropriates other people’s melodies, chord changes, rhythm patterns, and tonal and textual phrases.  These pepper his works. … [Dylan] adopts musical masks, styles, and personas.  He is a great mimic.  But he is also unmistakably Mr. Dylan whatever he does.[3]

The radical hybridity of Dylan’s music and lyrics has a family resemblance with his “comrade-in-arms” Jimi Hendrix who rationalized his ambivalence towards both Blackness and America through the nomadic ideology of the gypsy – a symbol of his mixed racial and ethnic heritage:

In Dylan, Hendrix recognized a kindred traveler, another musical itinerant who rationalized his own ambivalent identity through music. … Hendrix and Dylan — gypsy and hobo — navigated a musical passage of self-invention that led them into borderlands where musical styles, idioms, and traditions overlap.[4] Read more

Roger Scruton’s “The Rebirth of Nations”

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Roger Scruton is familiar to TOO readers for his starring role in Brenton Sanderson’s wonderful series, The War on the English (see here and here). Scruton’s comments on the destruction of the English quoted by Sanderson are well worth re-reading.

Scruton recently published an article in The American Spectator that summarizes some of the successes of nationalist parties in Europe and the deep disillusionment with immigration, multiculturalism and the European Union (“The Rebirth of Nations“). It is a very heartening article with some familiar themes, particularly the point that this has been a top-down, anti-democratic revolution. The elites have systematically stifled nationalist sentiments, but these sentiments are once again “prominent in the cultural landscape of Europe. And they are the more prominent for the attempt by the Eurocrats to forbid them.” Read more

Michele Bachmann Loves Israel

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I’m sure there are some good things to be said about Michele Bachmann of the “at least she is better than X” variety. However, it’s very worrying that she seems determined to break all the records for fealty to the Israel Lobby. In a talk before the Republican Jewish Coalition in Los Angeles she said:

I am convinced in my heart and in my mind that if the United States fails to stand with Israel, that is the end of the United States . . . [W]e have to show that we are inextricably entwined, that as a nation we have been blessed because of our relationship with Israel, and if we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play. And my husband and I are both Christians, and we believe very strongly the verse from Genesis [Genesis 12:3], we believe very strongly that nations also receive blessings as they bless Israel. It is a strong and beautiful principle.

There is simply no other civilized country in the world where a member of the political elite would claim–proudly and in public–to base her policy on an ancient religious text. She continues:

Right now in my own private Bible time, I am working through Isaiah . . . and there is continually a coming back to what God gave to Israel initially, which was the Torah and the Ten Commandments

It’s probably always a bad idea to base your actions on other people’s holy books. Isaiah also has quotes like these: “And the peoples shall take them, and bring them to their place; and the house of Israel shall possess them in the land of the Lord for servants and for handmaids; and they shall take them captive, whose captives they were; and they shall rule over their oppressors” (Isa. 14:2).” “They shall go after thee, in chains they shall come over; And they shall fall down unto thee, They shall make supplication unto thee” (Isa. 45:14); “They shall bow down to thee with their face to the earth, And lick the dust of thy feet” (49:23).

Here’s a video where she develops her views on Christianity and its “deep roots” in Judaism. She claims that because of these connections she worked on a Kibbutz in Israel as a teenager.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7cMxE1oFf0&feature=player_embedded#at=285

Read more

Charles Bloch: Is Being Anti-White Good for the Jews?

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It’s refreshing to see Charles Bloch discuss “anti-white Jews in his recent VDARE.com article (“Race Realism: Good for the Jews, Good for America“). He also acknowledges that

it is undeniable that Jews are vastly overrepresented in a number of anti-Western political and intellectual movements, such as liberalizing our immigration policy, suppressing legitimate scientific study of racial differences, and promoting anti-white discrimination. [links in original]

And that’s important because,  given their wealth and influence in the media, politics, and the academic world, at the very least Jews are an imposing component of the anti-White status quo in all of these areas. These anti-White attitudes are entirely mainstream among Jews; they pervade the organized Jewish community. What’s difficult is finding Jews like Bloch who honestly acknowledge what is a taboo subject for Jews. For his trouble he will doubtless be labeled a “self-hating Jew’ or worse by the organized Jewish community. It’s the sort of thing that has resulted in the SPLC labeling me a “virulent anti-Semite.” Read more

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

Dr. Virginia Abernethy joins American Third Position Board of Directors

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In addition to my duties as host of The Political Cesspool Radio Program, I serve as a member of the Board of Directors of the Council of Conservative Citizens and American Third Position.

That being said, I am pleased to announce that my friend, Dr. Virginia Abernethy, recently joined Bill Johnson, Dr. Kevin MacDonald, Dr. Tom Sunic, and me as a fellow member of the A3P Board.

Dr. Abernethy is an emeritus professor of psychiatry and anthropology at Vanderbilt Medical School. Her interdisciplinary post-graduate training in anthropology expanded into studies of human population and the interface of culture, population, and the environment. For 12 years, she was the editor of the ecology and social science journal, Population and Environment.

Abernethy is an expert regarding the “Demographic Transition” theory, the idea that fertility rates are automatically reduced with economic or social improvements. Dr. Abernethy is a member of the Board of Directors for Carrying Capacity Network.

Dr. Abernethy received her Ph.D. from Harvard University; M.B.A., Vanderbilt; and B.A. from Wellesley College. 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