“The thing about it was,” Oscar leaned forward and spoke with more intensity, his thoughts evidently stimulated by the topic, “1 couldn’t identify with any of the characters. There were episodes in Jewish novels that were mildly amusing or even interesting. Often the style was good, though by no means always. But nothing in any of them really moved me. And I always left the ones I managed to finish with a feeling of mild depression.
“And it’s not that I’m illiterate or unresponsive to good literature. I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve wept when reading Shakespeare. And what I read of his 20 years ago is still alive in my mind. I can quote great gobs of Julius Caesar and half a dozen other Shakespeare plays from memory. Hell, the same thing is true of The Iliad.” Oscar laughed. “I guess it’s not fair to expect other writers to come up to the standards set by Homer and Shakespeare. But there are plenty of less illustrious authors who’ve moved me too.”
“Ever read any Jewish poetry?”
“Unfortunately, yes, a little. Did I just say that Mailer and Roth were sick? God, I don’t know what word I can use to describe the Jewish poets I’ve sampled. I need something stronger than ‘sick.’ When I was an undergraduate Allen Ginsberg was required reading. I don’t know how the professor was able to say with a straight face that the garbage Ginsberg wrote was poetry. There were a couple of others whose names I can’t remember: some Holocaust verse, some really nutty stuff, all of it trivial. Considering how many Jewish novelists I’ve run across, I’m surprised there weren’t more Jewish poets.”
“Poetry doesn’t pay very well.”
“If you’re trying to make the point that Jewish writing is alien and inconsequential stuff for the most part, I’ll agree with you. But there’s also a great deal of garbage being written by Gentiles, some really awful drivel which is praised by the New York Times book reviewers right along with the Jewish drivel. So I can’t go along with you if you want to blame the decline of English literature on Jews.”
“But that’s exactly what I intend to do. Look at the pattern, Oscar. It’s not just literature; it’s our whole culture. In the 19th century our people created some of the greatest music ever composed: Beethoven and Wagner and Tchaikovsky and Schubert, Brahms and Chopin and Dvorak and Bizet and Liszt and Schumann and dozens of others. The 19th century was also a great century for literature and poetry — and for painting. Why did it all come to a screeching halt in the 20th century?”
“Did it? Seems to me there’s been some good music written since 1900. What about Sibelius? And there’ve been some really good writers too. Steinbeck is one. Shaw is another. I’m sure I could think of half a dozen other serious writers of this century who did excellent work if I concentrated for a minute or so.”
“You should have mentioned Richard Strauss,” Adelaide chimed in. “He’s a little too modern for me on the whole, but some of his music is quite good.”
“Okay, okay. So I exaggerated a little,” Harry resumed. “The fact remains, Sibelius and Shaw and Steinbeck and Strauss notwithstanding, that there has been a drastic decline in the level of artistic creativity in this century. Do you really dispute that?”
“I guess I’ll agree with you so far as poetry is concerned,” Oscar came back, trying to be conciliatory. “Some of Eliot’s poetry is all right, and one or two things Pound wrote, but I have noticed that not much poetry with even the slightest appeal to me has been published in the last 60 years or so, and that’s an enormous contrast with the English poetry of the 19th century, much of which I’m rather passionate about. I might agree with you on art too. There were some fine sculptors in Germany before the war — Breker, in particular — but most of the painting and sculpture being done these days are pure crap. Of course, that’s strictly subjective. And I’d have to think about prose literature and music for a while before I could say whether or not I agree with you on those.”
“For Christ’s sake, Oscar, you shouldn’t have to think about it. The music of the 19th century is represented by Beethoven and Wagner, by giants. Sibelius and Strauss may have been fine composers, but they weren’t giants. Furthermore, they don’t represent 20th-century music; they are the rare exceptions, not the 20th-century norm; they are holdovers from the previous century. The literature of the 19th century is represented by Dostoevsky and Dickens. Who in this century comes close to them?”
“When I think about it, it seems to me that it’s not so much that there’ve been no good 20th-century novelists,” Oscar replied. “A couple more names occurred to me while you were talking. Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil was up to the 19th-century standard. Maugham’s Of Human Bondage was first class, and some of Conrad’s stories weren’t really bad, though one wouldn’t call them ‘great.’ One book written after the Second World War which had a strong effect on me was Orwell’s 1984. And I’m sure there were a number of others. No, I think the problem is not so much a lack of good writing as it is that the good stuff is drowned in such a flood of garbage.”
“You’re a hard case, Oscar. I’m not denying that some good books have been written since the First World War — probably even a few since the Second World War — but the standards for literature are way down, just as they are for music, painting, and the other arts. It’s not just that there’s a flood of garbage; it’s that the garbage is what’s held up as the standard. It’s the garbage that’s winning the prizes; it’s the garbage that young writers are attempting to emulate. Will you admit that?”
“Well, okay. I could quibble about the details, but I think that in a broad sense you’re right: standards are down.”
“Right. And why are they down?”
“If I had to name a single reason, I’d say that it’s the increasing level of economic democracy. In the 19th century the standards were set by an elite. There were no radios, juke boxes, phonographs, or tape players. Composers wrote music to be played in concert halls. Joe Sixpack and his wife didn’t go to concerts. The people who did go were more discriminating than the people who buy phonograph records and cassette tapes now.
“Books were bought by the same elite. The reviewers and the critics wrote for this elite, not for the masses. Today the standard of living for Joe Sixpack is way up. His work week is much shorter. He has time for more recreation. He buys newspapers. He listens to the radio. He may even read a book every now and then. His kids have cassette tape players. His buying power, as a class, is much greater than that of the culture-bearing elite. So music and books are aimed at him more than at the elite. How’s that for an explanation?”
“You’re partly right,” Harry responded. That is, even if there were no other reason for the fall of standards, they probably would be down because of the larger amount of money and leisure time at the disposal of the least discriminating elements of society. But you’re overestimating the effect of economic democracy, and there are other reasons for what’s happened.
“Do you really think that the art on display in the museums today is so ugly just because Joe Sixpack is a slob? Is Joe’s wife to blame for the weird stuff that’s winning prizes for poetry these days? I’m certain that if you took a poll you’d find that Joe Sixpack and his wife would favor the sculpture of Breker to that of Picasso or Henry Moore. And neither Joe nor his wife buys enough Jewish novels to make a difference to the publishers.
“No, the standards haven’t just slipped along with the average intellectual level of the culture consumers; they’ve been deliberately pulled down.”
“Harry’s right, in a way,” Adelaide entered the conversation again. “Today the elite — those who think of themselves as such — would be more likely to favor the garbage than the masses would. But they think they’re holding the standards up by doing so. It’s the movement toward modernism, in which all the old values have been inverted. At least that’s the case in literature and painting and sculpture. In music Oscar is probably more nearly right. The taste of the masses isn’t for structured music, it’s for rhythm. Primitive music, Black music, h
as had a big influence in determining what’s played on the radio, because the radio audience is more primitive in its tastes than the concert audiences were.”
Harry and Oscar both looked at her. “All right. There’s another partial explanation,” Harry said. “It’s true that the people who buy art works and patronize museums today, along with those who run out to buy the hard-cover editions of every new piece of crap by Roth or Mailer as soon as it’s published, are trendy featherbrains who’ve been educated way beyond their intellectual capacity. They’re the new cultural elite. And they slavishly toe the modernist line laid down by the critics and the reviewers. An artist who has been given the critics’ stamp of approval can unveil a steaming plate full of fresh cow turds at an exhibition, the critics will praise it to the sky as a major new work of art, and the members of the new elite will all be ‘oohing’ and ‘ahing’ and nodding their heads wisely and talking with each other about how much ‘sensitivity’ on the part of the artist is revealed by the way the turds are oozing off the edge of the plate.
“Joe Sixpack would just laugh. He doesn’t have any cultural standards to uphold, so he doesn’t pay any attention to the critics. But the new elite didn’t decide all by itself that the trash being produced in the name of art today is art. The boobs who regard all representational art as ‘fascist’ didn’t develop that opinion by themselves. They don’t worship ugliness just because they’re mentally ill. They worship it because their powers of discrimination really aren’t all that much better than Joe’s — and because the critics persuaded them that it’s smart to worship it, that it’s fashionable, that it shows how much cleverer they are than Joe and his wife.
“The modernist movement was created by the critics — which is to say, by the mass media. And that’s just another way of saying that it was created by the Jews.”
“Now, wait a minute,” was Oscar’s reply. “The Jews didn’t invent the modernist movement. The tendency was there even in the last century. Some of the people involved were obviously sick or badly disturbed, and their art reflected their sickness. Others seemed more to be incompetents, who hadn’t the talent or self-discipline to produce genuine art, so they ignored all the rules and produced whatever was easy for them. But for the most part the practitioners of modernism weren’t Jews. Picasso wasn’t a Jew. Henry Moore wasn’t a Jew. A majority of the people today who’re pouring out confused, meaningless pap and calling it ‘poetry’ or daubing a few splotches of paint here and there on a canvas and calling it ‘art’ are Gentiles.”
“Hey, I didn’t say that the practitioners of modernism were all Jews — although there are a lot more of them involved in it than their percentage of the general population would warrant. Sure, the tendency was always present. There have always been a certain number of lazy and incompetent people — and emotionally disturbed people — in every profession. In the past people with good taste simply ignored them. What’s happened in this century is that the Jews have gained control of our mass media. That’s happened concurrently with the growth in importance of the mass media resulting from economic democracy. Prior to this century there were no Jewish critics or reviewers to speak of. Now a majority of them are Jews. The ones who aren’t follow the Jewish line, because they’re employed by Jews.
“Not only that, the cultural market is controlled by Jews in other ways. You can write any sort of novel or any sort of poetry you want these days. You can even get it published — if you’re willing to pay the publication expenses yourself. But if you want somebody else to publish it for you — a major publisher, with access to the chain bookstores — then you’d better tailor your literary creativity to suit what the publishers want. The same thing is true of the graphic and plastic arts. If the gallery owners don’t like it, nobody’ll see your work, and you’ll starve.
“The Jews have selected out the sick and undisciplined elements from the Gentile art world, elements always kept in check by natural forces before, and they have promoted and encouraged them. They have added their own practitioners to these elements. They have shut off the healthy elements from contact with the public to the extent they could. And they have done a pretty good job of persuading a superficially educated class of consumers of art and literature that all the old cultural standards ought to be stood on their heads: that ugliness should be praised and beauty laughed at, that chaos is admirable and order contemptible, that art which reflects the true inner life of their people is ‘racist’ and is not worthy of the respect shown to every piece of alien junk produced by niggers, gooks, or wogs.”
“But why, dammit? What’s in it for the Jews? Why should they try to stifle the culture of the people among whom they’re living and promote degeneracy and chaos in their place? It doesn’t make sense. It’s just asking for trouble. They would be better off by promoting the best elements in our culture instead of the worst.” Oscar’s impatience was audible in his voice.
“Why? I’ll tell you why.” Harry reached for the Bible again, opened it at one of the slips of paper, and began reading: “I will set the Egyptians against the Egyptians, and they shall fight, everyone against his brother and everyone against his neighbor, city against city and kingdom against kingdom. And the spirit of Egypt shall fail in the midst thereof, and I will destroy the counsel thereof, and they shall seek to the idols and to the charmers and to them that have familiar spirits and to the wizards.”
Harry looked up and asked, “Does that remind you of anything going on today? That was Isaiah’s formula for nation-wrecking 2,700 years ago, but it seems to me that it could just as well be applied to what they’ve been doing in this country for the last 50 years. In fact, if you look at the bigger picture, Isaiah’s formula might very well describe the way in which the Jews have dealt with the White world — with us and Europe, including Russia — for more than a century.”
“Well, it’s certainly true that the people running the mass media have done a pretty thorough job of destroying the counsel of the American people,” Oscar replied, “but I can’t accept what you’ve just read as proof that it’s been deliberate, and I don’t see what it has to do with their bias toward modernism.”
Harry came back: “Isaiah’s words are a bit quaint, but there’s more of a fit to the present situation than just the destruction of our ability to reason and figure out how to save ourselves as a people. ‘Everyone against his brother and everyone against his neighbor’: isn’t that a good way of describing the social atomization that’s taken place in White society, the breakdown of our sense of racial and community solidarity? And was there ever before such a proliferation of charmers and wizards selling their various brands of spiritual snake oil as in America today?
“As for modernism, what is it but the repudiation of our culture, the culture we have shared with all other White people throughout our history? What the Greeks wrote and what the Greeks sculpted 2,500 years ago appeals to us today for the same reasons it appealed to the Greeks then. We respond to beauty and order in the same way. The feelings expressed by Homer and Sophocles are our feelings. What Dostoevsky wrote spoke to Englishmen and Germans as well as to Russians, just as Dickens spoke to Russians and Germans, and Goethe spoke to Russians and Englishmen. A painting by Rembrandt or Turner or Friedrich said the same thing to all Europeans, just as did a symphony by Beethoven. We do not respond in the same way to Chinese music or Negro sculpture — or Jewish novels. Our culture tied us together, made us aware of our common heritage — and of our differences from those who did not share that heritage. And the Jew, the eternal outsider trying to work his way in, could not tolerate that. He had to break us up, destroy our solidarity, make us believe that we had no more in common with each other than with the Negro or the Chinaman — or the Jew. Modernism is the essential strategy of the parasite.”
Oscar leapt to his feet and slammed a fist into his other hand, visibly agitated. “You still haven’t proved anything. You keep reading suggestive passages from the Bible, passages which indicate ho
stility and a parasitic attitude on the part of the Jews. But proofs based on the Bible are only for fools. You can ‘prove’ anything you want with the Bible. The only thing this discussion has done for me is make me realize that I have to re-examine, rethink, re-explore many things I previously had accepted as true. In some cases I suspect I’ll realize that I had let myself be deceived by Jews, by media under their control or influence. But I’m certainly not going to let myself be persuaded to accept a theory of global conspiracy and parasitism by the Jews on the basis of a few things they wrote thousands of years ago.”
“Bravo, Oscar! If our talk really will lead you to rethink a few things, then I will have been completely successful. And I believe it will, because it is evident that you regard the matters we have been discussing with the gravity they deserve. You take these things seriously. Even the slightest suspicion that I may be correct disturbs you deeply. That is as it should be. Too often I’ve wasted my time arguing with men who regarded our debate as nothing but an intellectual exercise, a challenging diversion. Many times they were intelligent men, but they had no souls, no sense of responsibility. Whether I was right or wrong about the Jews or other issues we debated was not really important to them; it was not real. The only thing that was real to them was their own comfort, their own safety, their own welfare. They felt no responsibility to the world around them, no responsibility to their own race even. They were merely observers of life — spectators — not participants. But you, I believe, are a participant. Convincing these other fellows of the truth ultimately made no difference, because they remained nothing more than spectators. But when I finally have helped you to convince yourself of the truth, it will make a difference. You’ll do something about it.”
Oscar relaxed slightly and forced a smile. “I appreciate your expression of confidence in me. Really, I have learned some things today, and you’ve started me thinking about other things that I intend to continue thinking about. Even the things you showed me in the Bible provide food for thought. They had always been in front of my nose, but I had never looked at them — or at least I had never seen them in the light you cast on them for me. How did you learn so much about Moses and Isaiah? You don’t impress me as the Bible-student type.”
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