Fellows comes down on the un-politically popular side of nature, not nurture; quoting interviewee Richard Jost: “[The numbers of men involved in historic preservation] ‘would seem to argue for the existence of a preservation gene, which I would guess is located very near the Broadway show-tune gene.’”
But no sooner does Fellows take his stand on empirical reality than he moves, even more boldly, from cliché to “archetypal truth,” bringing in the big guns: Camille Paglia herself: “Gay men are aliens, cursed and gifted, the shamans of our time . . . caught midway between the male and female brains.”168
Shamans! Male and female brains! In more traditional societies, from the shamans of so-called “primitive” tribes169 to the monks of mediaeval Christendom, these men who “partake of the ambiguous virtue of the feminine,” as Evola says,170 have largely been drawn to perform religious functions.
In the last two hundred years, however, the speed of change has accelerated to such an extent that preservation of the built environment has itself taken on the trappings of a religious calling.171 Indeed, clergy took a leading role in the beginnings of the preservationist movement.
As Fellows quotes another wonderfully named-interviewee, Richard Wagner, a Wisconsin preservationist, “It’s a priestly role, in the sense of the shamans.”
If all this talk of “brokenness” and healing and religion—shamans, even!—seems a bit much, consider some evidence from those interested in preservation as such. For example, New York’s official real estate curmudgeon, “Jerimiah” (a pseudonym172), gathers some evidence of his own in a rare moment of meta-reflection on his task:
You can like those towers or hate those towers. But here’s the thing: All the glass boxes around the city are making us sick—mentally and physically. They are literally killing us as they hasten our deaths.
Cognitive neuroscientist Colin Ellard studied what happens to people on the sidewalk when they stand in front of a bland glass façade. In one study, he placed human subjects in front of the Whole Foods grocery store on the Lower East Side, strapped skin-conducting bracelets to their wrists, and asked them to take notes on their emotional states.
He reported, “When planted in front of Whole Foods, my participants stood awkwardly, casting around for something of interest to latch on to and talk about. They assessed their emotional state as being on the wrong side of ‘happy’ and their state of arousal was close to bottoming out. The physiological instruments strapped to their arms showed a similar pattern. These people were bored and unhappy. When asked to describe the site, words such as bland, monotonous and passionless rose to the top of the charts.”
In his book Happy City,173 Charles Montgomery calls this “an emerging disaster in street psychology.” The loss of old buildings and small businesses, the homogenization from suburban chains and condo boxes, is more than an aesthetic loss. It is damaging us both psychologically and physically.
Writes Montgomery, “The big-boxing of a city block harms the physical health of people living nearby, especially the elderly. Seniors who live among long stretches of dead frontage have actually been found to age more quickly than those who live on blocks with plenty of doors, windows, porch stoops, and destinations.”
In a city where people are reconceived as consumers, not citizens, it is best to keep everyone moving and disconnected.174
Disconnected! There’s that word again.
And lest your cold, libertard heart thinks that all this, despite references to Heidegger and archeofuturism, is really just hippie airy-fairy nonsense, consider how our white homelands, which are very popular on the New Right as examples of How to Live, handle this sort of thing; Jeremiah again:
Change, for its own sake, isn’t necessarily a good thing. In New York, “change” means eradication. There is no effort to blend the new with, and into, the old. It’s all or nothing, no compromise, no desire in preserving the past in the present to be appreciated in the future. It’s funny that Europeans understand that preserving the past, in historical and cultural contexts, is a way of maintaining a continuous link between what came before, what is now and what will be in the future. Warsaw, Dresden and Nurnberg for example, were obliterated during WWII. They were rebuilt, combining old and new (which included painstakingly recreating historic structures) because the people understood the importance of being able to connect with their past. Unfortunately, preserving and acknowledging New York’s history doesn’t exist in the minds and actions of developers. A dystopian city, à la “Blade Runner” is something we all should fear since that seems to be the direction New York is heading.
Fellows even finds himself drifting further into the vortex of Traditionalism, quoting from John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s The Necessity for Ruins to the effect that the preservationist “sees history not as a continuity but as a dramatic discontinuity,175 a kind of cosmic drama,” involving a necessary plunge into chaos and decay (as in the nigredo stage of alchemy?) before the work of restoration can return us to “that golden age of harmonious beginnings.”
This is how we reproduce the cosmic scheme and correct history.176 Are we perhaps trying to reenact some ancient myth of birth, death and redemption?177
Gosh, could the “conservatives” be wrong? Perhaps all those childless men do have some role to play in reproduction and survival, at least in the reproduction of the past into the future and the survival of cities, not global consumerist playgrounds?
I suspect that at this point Fellows’ readers in the architecture178 or “gay studies” shelves may have started to bleed from the ears as he hits these levels. Nevertheless, it is a rare and valuable empirical supplement to the more abstract works alluded to above (as well as some of my own) that strive to remind us of role of the non-family man in the creation and preservation of Aryan culture.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
June 17, 2016
THE GILMORE GIRLS
OCCUPY WALL STREET
“These ladies were so much of the place and the place so much of themselves that from the first of their being revealed to me I felt that nothing else at Brookbridge much mattered. They were what, for me, at any rate, Brookbridge had most to give: I mean in the way of what it was naturally strongest in, the thing we called in New York the New England expression, the air of Puritanism reclaimed and refined.”
—Henry James, “‘Europe’”
What passes for “the Right” in America, having first been seduced by apologists for Capital like Ayn Rand and William F. Buckley, then subjected to a coup d’état by the neo-con junta, is in no position to support, approve, or even understand the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. The Bourbons may have, as Talleyrand supposedly said, learned nothing and forgotten nothing, but the gleaming, streamlined Neo-Right (not to be confused with the European or North American New Right) has forgotten everything the Right used to stand for, and “leaned” one thing—“Lower tax rates solve everything!”—which isn’t even true.179
Fight Wall Street? What sense is there in that, when the “official” conservative talking heads are all employees of Murdoch or GE, and think, and look, more like Patrick Bateman than George Bailey. As Oliver Stone realized to his horror, he gave Gordon Gekko a speech that could have come from the pen of William Jennings Bryan, to say nothing of William Pierce:
The richest one percent of this country owns half our country’s wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons, and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It’s bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paperclip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you’re not naïve enough to think we’re living in a democracy, are you buddy? It’s the free market. And you’re a part of it.
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And people’s reaction was “Fuck yeah! Where do I git onea them MBAs?”
One theme from the dull contempt with which the Official Right greeted OWS that struck me as more true than either side may realize was something like this, which you’ve heard versions of time after time:
This isn’t a serious political movement worth our notice. It’s just a bunch of sociology majors who can’t get jobs and want the whole world to be like college again.
There’s something to this, but probably not what O’Reilly’s viewers think is there. First, though, let’s back up a bit.
For a while I was merrily documenting each of Jim Kunstler’s weekly tirades against the White People on his eponymous Peak-Everything blog, www.kunstler.com, as evidence of the White-hate that simmers just beneath the “thin veneer” (as his co-ethnic, Freud, would say) of criticism of our gas-guzzling society,180 which is often the true motive behind all this “green” blather. However, it just got too boring, the same predictable rant, even the same stomach-churning metaphors—pus, bacteria, rancid lard—for the White Plague, the same “just wait for it” as the price of oil rose only to then fall as life went on, until finally I called it quits.
So it’s good to see Edmund Connelly taking up the torch. His whole article is important reading, but the quote from Jim is worth reproducing here, as it contains a very excusable mistake, worthy of further consideration.
In his recent blog “Our Turn?,” he begins with a familiar Jewish obsession:
“Nations go crazy. It’s terrifying when it happens, especially to a major nation with the ability to project its craziness outward. We look back on the psychotic break of Germany in 1933 and still wonder how the then-best-educated population in Europe could fall under the sway of a sociopathic political program. We behold the carnage and devastation left in the wake of that episode, and decades later you still can do little more than shake your head in bewilderment.”
Readers of Kunstler’s blogs will know of his fear and contempt for Americans who do not live in big cities and who are not reflexively liberal in their politics. These are the infamous “cornporn Nazis” [sic] of Kunstler’s nightmares.181
The first thing one notices, of course, is the typical Judaic myopia: history is all about Jim’s little tribe, and it’s the story of the innocent Jews being constantly oppressed and murdered by the goyim, who can’t possibly have any reasons to hate Jews, and so must be completely insane. And indeed, who but the crazed could possibly want to harm God’s Little Pets?
Since the Judaics, from Freud, or perhaps Moses Mendelssohn, up to the latest po-mo clown, are always boasting about how their “outsider status” allows them a privileged objectivity about the general culture, you’d think then that they’d acknowledge being a little bit of an interested party in this matter. One might think “sociopathic political program” might refer to the Bolshevik revolution, inspired by the Judaic Marx and implemented and sustained by Russian Judaic terrorists, sustained for over 70 years, and involving the imprisonment or murder of tens of millions; how’s that for “carnage and devastation”?182
Some might suggest the original “mad nation” was France in 1789. To some other “outsiders,” the “psychotic break” might be better known to them as the European Revolution of 1933. What could be crazier than that last attempt by the “best educated” of Europe to “break” the power of Finance Capital? Kinda sounds like “Occupy Wall Street,” now, don’t it?
But for now I want to focus on the small but interesting factual error: Jim is no fan of the big cities. Of course, it’s easy to make that assumption, even apart from his liberal-Judaic background. He hates the Suburbs, as the epitome of our Easy Motoring Culture of cheap oil and plastic, and jobs for rednecks above their proper station, and of course he hates the Rural areas, being a Judaic and all—as Israel Shahak pointed out, Judaism is the only culture that has never idealized the worker of the land, from Greek pastoralism to the Prussian Junkers, British “country life,” and the Jeffersonian yeoman183—but he loathes the energy-wasting, gentrifying Cities almost as much.
Jim, as you can see, is a very hard man to please.
See, Jim has his own version of the country squire going on, up in the Capital District, although his contempt for the proles makes him incapable of the gently amused appreciation Bill Kauffman—“The Sage of Batavia” as Gore Vidal calls him—brings to the same area. Still, Jim is very much the “country gentleman” in his own way, or rather, a way that hasn’t been noticed very much—hence Connelly’s natural error—and to which I want to pay some attention here, in the context of Occupy Wall Street.
I even have a name for it: the Neo-Rural Liberal.
Ever notice that despite their contempt for rednecks and Babbitts, the liberal prefers to live in a small town or village? Martha’s Vineyard, Fire Island, Hampton Bays, you get the picture? Hell, even the Big City Liberal lives in a village, whether historically rooted (Greenwich Village) or just a realtor’s marketing ploy (The East Village). Berkeley itself is just a village compared to San Francisco (where evil Bankers and the maids live).
Obviously, liberals prefer to live with other liberals; we all prefer to live with our own kind. One only needs to point this out because liberals themselves vociferously deny it they have any such atavistic tendencies, and deny the privilege to Other Whites, who get forced busing and integration, and a sneer if they still contrive (as most do, even now) to escape to those terrible Auto Suburbs or NASCAR Towns that the Jims hate so much.
Those that didn’t grow up among Their Own soon acquire the taste when they go away (and they have to, to Get Away from Them) to college. The “college town” is the classic example of a small town filled for some reason with flaming liberals; in fact, most of them will never be as liberal as they are now, as they act out against parents, teachers, society, “townies,” etc.
Even the aforementioned big cities have their college towns: Columbia is located on the Upper West Side—the White part, of course, that George Carlin’s teen gang preferred to call “White Harlem”—NYU in the Village.
This was the crystallization point of the film, The Big Chill. The eponymous chill is the cold world outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of the mighty U. of M. That was the last (perhaps only) time any of them were content, or even settled, if that doesn’t seem too paradoxical a way to describe the transitory student life; now, working and living in horrifying cities (even then, before the “Black Undertow” of the last three decades) like Detroit, Atlanta, New York, and Hollywood, their lives suck.
The only reasonably grounded one lives in small town South Carolina, but he’s betrayed his “radical” past and become a “businessman.” His guilt is assuaged only by playing unwilling host to his college buds, and fathering a child on one of them, at his wife’s suggestion. No small town prudes here!
He does have a big old Victorian house, though, so that when they all meet up for the funeral of one of their number, they decide to bag the cities for the weekend and try to re-create their student lives in one of those old Victorian student houses on Ann Arbor’s Liberty Street (perhaps a few doors up from that quaint little bookstore you may have heard of, name of “Borders,” which recently enacted its own cycle of boom and bust).
“You know, I live here. This place means something to me. I’m dug in.” Of course, the University of Michigan sweatshirt he wears while making that “I’ll take my stand” speech betrays Kevin Kline’s self-delusion; he has a house full of college buddies watching the Michigan-Michigan State game (how’s that for college town overkill?), and the only advantage to South Carolina, apart from cheap labor to exploit, is that as a Local Businessman, the cops don’t crack his skull for smoking marijuana.
Like all Disingenuous White Liberals,184 Motown may be “the only music in this house” but only because that’s what they listened to at U. of M. (the Evil Husband who goes home to see to the kids, of course, lives in Detroit, not Ann Arbor).
Ano
ther early adumbration of the meme is found in Paul Fussell’s Class.185 It’s pretty accurate and amusing (such as his take on the reasons for the popularity of the Preppy Handbook, and the dreaded “one size fits all Proles” tractor hat), but Fussell just can’t accept the idea that what OWS calls “the one percent” is out of his reach as well; “they have no interest in ideas” he sour-grapes (his ideas, of course), but then he reveals that some (the smart ones, of course) can drop out of the whole class system. These free spirits he dubs “Class X.”
In a devastating review in The Atlantic,186 authentic Top Class chronicler Wilfred Sheed pointed out that the Class X-ers seemed to be a recognizable type: tenure track academics like Fussell himself, who “never talk about the food or wine being served” not because of superior taste, as Fussell thinks, but because years of cafeteria food and jug wine “have given them palates of stone.”
These are the dreary, know-it-all inhabitants of CollegeTown USA, with their Fair Trade coffee (priced out of prole reach) and solar collectors that take 10 years to “pay for themselves” (not really an option for people living on payday loans).
Of course, in itself, small town life is a natural taste. After all, small towns always score high on those “Best Place to Live” surveys. A whole cable channel, Hallmark, is devoted to hazily filmed fairy tales about big-city career women who find the secret to happiness when their car breaks down in Hooterville.187 It’s the flip side to the Lifetime channel, where the women are beaten, raped, and killed by their over-achieving big-city boyfriends. Problem is, small towns are full of White Others, who are not only non-Jewish, but even conservative. As Wallace Shawn, the WASP Woody Allen would say: Inconceivable!
The Homo and the Negro Page 10
