Green Nazis in Space: New Essays in Literature, Art, and Culture
Page 23
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“Which century?” replies John Caradine’s engineer to a reporter’s question about “the desperadoes who came through here back in ’62,” the year of the Mockingbird film, in the MST3k version of Night Train to Mundo Fine (Coleman Francis, 1965).
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Gregory Peck is not enough. It took the prospect of seeing an unbeatable array of now-classic character actors in their youth (Jack Klugman as an angry ex-juvie!) to get me to watch Twelve Angry Men. Speaking of “young adult books,” I did read Catcher on my own, and came away with a loathing not for the hapless residents of Pency Prep but for the real “phonies,” Upper West Side Jews like the pretentious author and his protagonist.
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I’m pretty sure I was assigned Lord of the Flies, and I know I didn’t read that, as the cover of the Capricorn paperback I found repulsive. Mockingbird has a nice cover, at least in hardcover, and the new book shares the same look; is the illustrator still alive, toiling away for Harpers?
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Serge F. Kovalesti and Alexandra Alter, “Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman’ May Have Been Found Earlier Than Thought,” New York Times, July 2, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/03/ books/
harper-lee-go-set-a-watchman-may-have-been-found-earlier-than-thought.html
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Margot Metroland, “Y’all Can Kill That Mockingbird Now,” http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/09/yall-can-kill-that-mockingbird-now/. See also “Atticus in Bizarro World: Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman,” http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/07/
atticus-in-bizarro-world/
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Perhaps this increase in the role of her playmate Dill, based on Truman Capote, is the origin, and perhaps the truth, behind the rumors of Capote getting involved in the writing or at least the recollections.
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Bad people, like this New Jersey mook, or later the school principal from up in the Hill Country of Alabama, always like things written down: the latter “doesn’t believe anything unless it’s written down” and then “when it’s written down he believes every word of it.” Tradition, by contrast, is non-literate. This goes back to the curious Genesis 9:22, where Ham (father of the negro race) is cursed for “seeing the nakedness” of his drunken father, Noah. Alexander Jacob suggests may refer to “the public dissemination of the ancestral wisdom among the highly literate Hamitic civilizations of Sumer and Egypt, whereas the other Indo-Europeans preserved it in purely oral form.” “The Indo-European Origins of the Grail” in Leopold von Schrodeder and Alexander Jacob, The Grail: Two Studies (Numen Books, 2015), p. 169, n402.
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The New Jersey snob, we hear, is not a family man. Catholicism, or High Church tendencies within Anglicanism, has long been a comfy place for curmudgeons, bachelors, homosexuals and other oddballs to hide in plain sight. In Brideshead Revisited, Charles’ cousin sternly remonstrates him when going up to Oxford to “Avoid Anglo Catholics; they are all sodomites with atrocious accents.” On the fin de siècle in general, see Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), which discusses Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, J.-K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, Paul Verlaine, and even Frederick Rolfe (who went so far as to style himself “Fr. Rolfe” when he wasn’t playing as the Sicilian Baron Corvo). For the American, or at least Northern, angle, see Douglass Shand-Tucci’s Ralph Adams Cram: Boston Bohemia, 1881–1900 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). On the Catholic side, there’s always one in every parish that want more incense, High Masses, and sermons on Meister Eckhart; see J. F. Powers’ Morte d’Urban (New York: Doubleday, 1962), itself winner of the 1963 National Book Award for Fiction. To understand Powers, you must understand that he was that rare bird, a sort of proto-Leftist, pre-Vatican II Irish Catholic who thought America was a nation of knuckle-dragging, war-mongering, racist Protestants, to whom his kind were superior in politics and culture, as well as ethics and religion. He fights both incense and homos, which he associates with the Right: McCarthy and Cohen, Whittaker Chambers, Cardinal Spellman. Also in the early ’60s, even J. D. Salinger gets in the act; his narrator in the New Yorker story “Zooey” disparaging a boy his mother, Irish Catholic Bessie, recommends to sister Franny as being a weepy mother’s boy “who probably sleeps with a rosary under his pillow.”
Alan Watts describes his own struggle as a “spike” during his brief Episcopal priesthood in his autobiography, In My Own Way; later, in Beyond Theology, he will try to appreciate the other side: “The insides of most Protestant churches resemble courthouses or town halls, and the focal point of their services is a serious exhortation from a man in a black gown. . . . If I try to set aside the innate prejudices which I feel against this religion, I begin to marvel at the depth of its commitment to earnestness and ugliness. . . . I begin to realize that those incredibly plain people, with their almost unique lack of color, may after all be one of the most astonishing reaches of the divine Maya-the-Dancer of the world as far out from himself as he can get, dancing not-dancing” (Beyond Theology, ch. 2).
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I thank Ms. Metroland, op. cit., for identifying the speaker from the North as perhaps Robert Welch of the John Birch Society himself. When we first meet Atticus, he’s reading with disapproval a book titled The Strange Case of Alger Hiss. Thanks to Google, we can instantly date this to 1953, when this book (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1953. $3.95.), by one Earl Jowitt, that is, “The” Earl Jowitt, a parlor pinko no doubt, appeared. This “Earl” business explains why Atticus thinks he “shows a childlike faith in the integrity of civil servants,” imagines the Congress to “correspond to their aristocracy,” and in general has “no understanding of American politics a-tall.” The Earl’s book is anti-Chambers and apparently one of the first exercises in what the Clintons have dubbed “the politics of personal destruction.” It has always puzzled me as to why the Hissites claim that Chambers was in love with Hiss, since it is clearly they themselves who have a big ol’ crush on dashing young diplomats improving the world from their positions in the One World Government.
Later, Louise will find a pamphlet back at the house entitled “The Black Plague,” essaying forth a eugenic perspective about “brain pans, whatever they are.” It’s an obvious enough title to be her own creation, but I do find there is a pamphlet by that title by that old conspiracy-monger, Eustace Mullins. The version I can find online is obviously from the late ’60s (there’s a Black Panther on the cover and Malcolm X is referenced on the first page; there’s even talk of the Zebra killer) and the emphasis is culture, not physiology.
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New York newspapers are a note that ties the book together. “You’ve been reading those New York papers,” Atticus points out during their final confrontation. When she first arrives, he asks her “how much of what’s going on down here gets into the newspapers” and she responds “Well, to hear the Post tell it, we lynch ’em for breakfast down here.” Later, when she bristles as a former schoolmate makes a crude negro joke, she says “I’m getting like the New York Post.” Younger readers need to know that at the time, the New York Post was a Liberal newspaper.
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Like most such, it “escaped her notice” that “the son had developed all the latent characteristics of a three-dollar bill.”
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“You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. A well-scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. Good nutrition’s given you some length of bone, but you’re not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling?” Dr. Hannibal Lecter, The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991). Jean Louise may not know what a brain pan is, and be horrified by those who do, but she’s eager to join with the rest of the town to denigrate the poorer members of her own race.
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As always, it’s impossible to fathom the Liberal mind, or to follow its never-ending, shall we say, revol
utions. Wasn’t it just last year that Liberals were pumping their fists—or other body parts—to Lady Gaga’s insistence that she and her Little Monsters were “born this way”? (Vigilant Citizen)
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“Race realism is one of the intellectual foundations of White Nationalism. Race realism is the thesis that racial differences are objective facts of nature, which pre-exist human consciousness, human society, and even the human race itself.” Greg Johnson: “Why Race is Not a ‘Social Construct,’” http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/07/why-race-is-not-a-social-construct/
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The foolishness of electoral politics: Eisenhower was the one sending troops in to enforce desegregation, out of Cold War necessity. And right on time for the book’s appearance, calls to remove Jefferson and Jackson from the Democrat pantheon (and the currency); racists, don’t you know?
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As chronicled by Paul Kersey on his invaluable blog, Stuff Black People Don’t Like, and compiled in his collection The Tragic City: Birmingham 1963–2013 (CreateSpace, 2013).
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All this has been chronicled, not, of course, in those “New York newspapers,” but on Paul Kersey’s invaluable blog, Stuff Black People Don’t Like, stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com
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Such as, obviously, the blog Those Who Can See, thosewhocansee.blogspot.com For my own discuss of Carpenter’s film—a prior, and implicitly White, version of The Matrix, see my “He Writes! You Read! They Live!” in The Homo & the Negro.
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It would appear that in the occluded world of They Live!, the color-blind would indeed be immune to the alien’s brainwashing.
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Is that English? He means “as well as what they should be” I guess. From a man arguing the inferiority of the negro? This is the only place where the book feels like a first draft.
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Graham: “Because everything with you is seeing, isn’t it? Your primary sensory intake that makes your dream live is seeing. Reflections. Mirrors. Images. . . .” See my “Phil and Will: Awakening Through Repetition in Groundhog Day, Point of Terror, and Manhunter, Part 2,” http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/12/awakening-through-repetition-part-2/. “I asked my mother what I had seen, and she told me that he was not just a white man turned brown, but a different kind of man called a ‘Negro.’ But I already saw the differences before I was told the name and explanation. Indeed, I asked for an explanation because I saw the differences. My mother and I certainly did not construct the differences that were apparent to all.” Greg Johnson, op. cit., emphases his.
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Scout sneaks into the courthouse and sees Atticus and Hank at the Citizens’ Council meeting, and wonders if anyone sees her there (they do). Calpurnia, the old family retainer who’s been radicalized by the civil rights interlopers, can no longer see Scout. Even the long reminiscence about Scout and Dill—the character based on Truman Capote and a favorite of readers, involved Dill and a supposed machine to see through walls.
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Scout goes on to say she needs the watchman to “proclaim to them all that twenty-six years is too long to play a joke on anybody,” which could indeed be said of those Whites who have bought into the whole “color-blind” idea. Negroes, as Atticus points out, “vote in blocs.”
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Again, the text seems wrong here; surely this should be “conscience,” or is Jack meant to be confused, misled by Jung’s “collective consciousness,” or is there some other symbolism here I’m missing?
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“The foundation of race realism is sense experience, not scientific theorizing.”—Greg Johnson, op. cit.
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And speaking of the Finch family, we also wonder about how Uncle Jack made so much money off his poor Alabama patients during the Depression so as to retire wealthy in his forties.
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Ironically, the uber-shysters running the “schools” are fleecing the little lambs blind, pocketing their federally guaranteed loans and sending them out as debt slaves, most of whom will either have no jobs, or find themselves forced into lucrative corporate slavery rather than indulging in “pro bono defense.” In a further irony, only the rich can afford such society-wrecking concern for “the poor,” while the poor themselves are suckered into . . . law school (“diversity”) and debt slavery.
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Similarly, TKAM has bred two generations of lambs that, faced with the overwhelming fact that law school is a disastrously bad bet (unless your parents foot the bill, or it’s a “tier 1” school) respond as Special Snowflakes: “When I got into law school a few months ago a law school professor (who is also a family friend) sent me a glut of articles . . . and said to read them, then read To Kill a Mockingbird again. Realize that you are not part of that statistic if you remember why you really want to practice law. So, dear Gawker, I am going to just say that I am rubber and you are glue and all the law school bashing rolls off me and sticks to you.” Really, if I were a liberal constituency, I’d be very afraid of being represented by delusional idiots like this. Generally, see “Do Not Go to a Second-Tier Law School Under Any Circumstances” by Hamilton Nolan, Gawker, 3/05/12, http://gawker.com/5890655/
do-not-go-to-a-second-tier-law-school-under-any-circumstances: “In case you’ve forgotten, let us take this opportunity to remind you: do not go to law school. Law school is worthless. Even more worthless than you think. Law school will not make you happy. The smart kids are not going to law school. You should not go to law school.” Although himself a law professor, Paul Campos has been at the forefront of exposing the “law school scam”: “The odds of a graduate getting a job that justifies incurring the schools’ typical debt are essentially 100 to 1. . . . The result is a system that has produced an entire generation of over-credentialed, underemployed, and deeply indebted young people.” (The Atlantic, September, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/
features/archive/2014/08/the-law-school-scam/375069/). Ironically, or appropriately, the worst hit have been the “solo practitioners” who wanted to be just like Atticus: “Solo practitioners, the largest single group of American lawyers and the heart and soul of the profession, have struggled for a quarter of a century. . . . In 1988, solo practitioners earned an inflation-adjusted $70,747. By 2012, earnings had fallen to $49,130, a 30% decrease in real income. And note, $49,130 is not the starting salary for these lawyers. It is the average earnings of all 354,000 lawyers who filed as solo practitioners that year.” Benjamin Barton, “The fall and rise of lawyers,” CNN, May 22, 2015.
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See my review of The Magical Universe of William Burroughs, “Curses, Cut-Ups, and Contraptions: The ‘Disastrous Success’ of William Burroughs’ Magick,” http://www.counter-currents.com/
2015/01/curses-cut-ups-and-contraptions/
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Burroughs, perhaps hopefully, described Nova Express as “an action novel that can be read by any twelve year old.” See Oliver Harris’ “Introduction” to Nova Express: The Restored Text (New York: Penguin, 2013), p. xliv.
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“In 1962, Grove Press issued a promotional booklet to accompany the November 20, 1962 American publication of Naked Lunch. . . . The promotional pamphlet includes an eight-page selection of Naked Lunch. Not surprisingly, Rosset chose sections that support the critical readings of the novel. The “Meeting of International Conference of Technological Society” and “The County Clerk” section highlight the satirical nature of Naked Lunch to the fullest. Rosset also featured these pieces (along with a section entitled “Interzone”) in Evergreen Review No. 16 of January / February 1961. They present Burroughs’ humor, language and voice at their most obvious.” “Burroughs Ephemera 2: Naked Lunch Prospectus,” (http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/ ephemera/naked-lunch-prospectus/). Note that “The County Clerk” is preceded by “Meeting of International Conference of T
echnological Society” which involves horrifying insect/human mutations, like the slug-like Willoughby and “his kind.”
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“Harper Lee: the ‘great lie’ she didn’t write Mockingbird rears its head again,” Glynnis MacCool, The Guardian, July 15, 2015, http:// www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/20/harper-lee-to-kill-a-mockingbird-authorship-women-writers
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And perhaps we should note the similarity of William Willoughby to William Burroughs?
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“William S. Burroughs Trashes Truman Capote In Open Letter” by Jen Carlson, Gothamist, August 2, 2012, http://gothamist.com/
2012/08/02/william_s_burroughs_trashes_truman.php. The “stunning opening” to Nova Express was originally titled “Open Letter” and is signed by “J. Lee”; see Harris, op. cit., pp. 193, 199.