Those not lucky enough to relocate to one of the Urban Villages or College Towns will work like demons at banking or law or “writing,” and hopefully make enough money, mostly by ripping off the infra-dig real Main Street, to move to some liberal-restricted “Main Street” inhabited by tame, amusing Vermont eccentric types and which “just happens” to exclude the Others due to lack of ready cash: the appeal of the Hamptons, Vineyard, etc.
Since Fire Island has no actual industry or economy, the vacationing Upper gets the thrill of everything he buys being a twice-as-expensive “import.” Meanwhile, the handful of natives needed to run the cash registers and bus the tables lives in trailers and flee to the mainland after Columbus Day.
The Others also includes the black chappies, of course, other than a couple of IQ outliers like P. Diddy or Henry Gates, who serve as ready exhibits to show that we’re not racists, like those awful Other Whites across town; no “Jim Crow” laws needed, or nasty old “traditions” or irrational “customs,” just the insurmountable barriers of money and education. What could be more fair, as the liberal understands the word?
Even Jim Kunstler fits the picture. I’ve lived around there, and you’ve got to have some kind of money to live a decent life in a hell-hole like the Capital District. But if you do, life can be sweet; hell, if there is anything around it’s cheap, and you mail order the rest, or have it delivered from the city, or custom built; even the carpenters, as Fussell already observed, are likely to be fellow Ivy grads. Money buys the private conveniences, and also the cars and air tickets that Jim uses as he circles the globe, decrying the carbon footprints of the rednecks and other Bigfoots.
Hey, the richest guys in America live in Omaha, NE and Redmond, WA.
So, after destroying the Cities with their idiotic laws and racial nonsense, the Liberal now yearns for the palmy days of ice cream socials and bandstands in the park (“Next stop Willoughby!”), recreated, Disney-like, in areas from which the twin wrecking balls of liberalism and finance capital have driven the Other Whites, leaving the Liberals, like the lucky ones in Blade Runner, to “live the Good Life” in what we might call the “super-Urban” colonies.
Despite all his smug superiority over “urban planners,” Kunstler’s vision isn’t that much different than Robert Moses’. Unlike Jane Jacobs, he has no appreciation for true diversity as manifested in the Big City, and although he wouldn’t endorse Moses’ techniques of political and literal bulldozing, he’d be quite happy living with his think-alike liberal peers in a devastated urban hulk, where the White Ethnics have been driven out from lack of jobs, but the Darkies are kept at bay by high rents.
This became clear to me over the last year or so, as, during an extended period of unemployment, I became hooked on the three-episode weekly marathon repeats of The Gilmore Girls, a show I had known only from occasional jokes and parodies during its initial run (2000–2007). Nothing I had ever heard about it had led me to consider watching it then, nor did it give me any reason to reconsider now.188
Needless to say, the show is loathsome on its own terms, but I began to find it utterly fascinating as a window onto the Liberal Mind and its Sense of Place.
Almost a decade of reviews, blogs, and forums has already established a Minority Opinion, among even Liberals, that the unintended irony of the show is that Lorelei Gilmore, rebellious child of privilege, is presented to us as supremely beautiful, intelligent, witty, and above all heroic in her struggle against her wealthy, scheming, manipulative parents, while in fact being intensely annoying, self-destructive, deluded, almost autistically self-involved in dealing with those she condescends to notice, and, above all, both spoiled and ungrateful to her long-suffering parents (the father, played by echt-WASP and hometown boy Edward Herrmann, was the hook that got me watching in the first place).
What particularly struck me, however, and is of relevance here, is the creation of Stars Hollow, the small town that Lorelei ran away to as a pregnant, unmarried teenager and where she has raised her daughter (also named Lorelei, or Rory for convenience—see what I mean about egotism?) over the last sixteen years, and who is also, as her namesake, supremely beautiful, intelligent, witty, but—having benefited from being raised by Lorelei and not her evil parents—is able to attend Yale and have rich boyfriends without getting knocked up.
Stars Hollow is in the television tradition of small backwaters populated by dimwitted but good-hearted folk that the main character can play against. Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, North Carolina is probably the classic example. Stars Hollow is unlike Mayberry, however, not just in being in the Northeast but also by being as much a college town as one could have without an actual college; for the convenience of seven years of story arcs, it seems to be located in spitting distance of an elite girls school and Yale, and within easy commuting distance of the ritzy Connecticut suburbs (for weekly parental dinners, leading to the Airing of Grievances—yes, Lauren Graham was one of Seinfeld’s ladies of the week—fueled by vast quantities of Pop’s gin) and New York City (for job interviews with the New York Times right out of school, and perhaps to occupy Wall Street without missing Mom’s home cooking).
Most significantly, Stars Hollow is brimming with small town traditions and ways that are the subject of local pride and care, but which Lorelei, despite living there almost two decades, feigns ignorance of and whose evident stupidity or outright craziness she greets with her biting “wit” and corrosive “irony” to the amusement of steadily declining TV audiences.
The town of Stars Hollow is a simulacrum, to use a word beloved by Liberals of a theoretical bent, of a small New England town but one inhabited by a multi-culti elite (well, one Korean family and a black guy who is, of course, not just hyper-competent but also FRENCH) who think like Woody Allen, while the people who built and inhabit the real Stars Hollows of the world are portrayed, if townspeople, as stupid but amusing to Lorelei (and us, of course) or else, like her parents, monsters of evil.189
One thinks of Henry James’s description, for his English audience, of the town of Concord, Mass., in the time of Hawthorne:
It is very possible that at this period there was not (even) an Irishman in Concord; the place would have been a village community operating in excellent conditions. Such a village community was not the least honourable item in the sum of New England civilisation. Its spreading elms and plain white houses, its generous summers and ponderous winters, its immediate background of promiscuous field and forest, would have been part of the composition. For the rest, there were the selectmen and the town-meetings, the town-schools and the self-governing spirit, the rigid morality, the friendly and familiar manners, the perfect competence of the little society to manage its affairs itself.190
I suppose this must be what Martha’s Vineyard is like: the small rural towns built by White Protestants, inhabited by Woody Allen clones.
The body snatchers came from the Levant, not outer space, and they’ve taken over Santa Rita! And if your town is “lucky,” you’re next! Tomorrow the world?
Lurking behind it all, especially the Judaic obsession with the danger of a recurrence of the German Revolution of 1933, is what we might call the Final Solution to the Goyim Problem. For, as no less a “genius” than Freud has told us, an obsession with the sins of others is a cover for one’s own sins. The German sin was to do to the Judaics as the Judaics would do to us, before the Judaics had enough power to do so. For centuries, this has been the plan; we’ve seen it what happens when Judaics take power during the Russian Terror, and Palestine is only a dress rehearsal, paid for by the goyim themselves, for the Big Show.
As Connelly concludes, the Judaics who still form the template for “real liberals” are:
a hostile elite that fears and mostly dislikes us—people like Frank Rich, [James] Howard Kunstler, and thousands of other antsy Jews like them. What will happen to us if such Jews feel so at risk that they preemptively seek to neutralize the “threatening” ones among us?
In Homo Americanus, as I’ve noted numerous times, Croatian savant Tomislav Sunić envisions such a scenario for any group in America that might be targeted: “Thus, in order for the proper functioning of future Americanized society, the removal of millions of surplus citizens must become a social and possibly also an ecological necessity.”
Needless to say, this is the dream of the Judaic-minded Finance Capitalists as well: a global economy where the awful dirty workers are safely on the other side of the world, and some day perhaps eliminated altogether in our “virtual economy,” leaving them to live in peace in small towns from Jackson Hole to Davos.
Critics like Peter Lamborn Wilson pointed out long ago that contrary to all the “cyberspace” fluff there is no “virtual” economy, since we need to eat. The question is: how little food is needed? Answer: enough to feed the bosses.
And that’s the ultimate appeal of Rev. Jim’s Peak-Everything gospel: die-off is so much simpler, so much cleaner, even greener.191 The ugly, fat, rural “people,” who live and even thrive only due to the anomaly of cheap oil, will soon be dead, starved by the lack of Cheesy Poofs after Peak Oil, and if that doesn’t get them, Al Gore’s Big Sweat will. No need for any messy trains, camps, and ovens. And then the smug, if not meek, will inherit the Earth.
There’s an even bigger picture here, extending beyond television, movies and even the fossil fuel culture; consider this interesting observation from Maury Knudson on the “Shifting Other”:
Prior to 1920, the Great Other in American culture was the seducer in the big city. The innocent young girl from the country would be picked up by the man with oily, slicked-back hair and pencil thin moustache. Or, an innocent young man from the country would find himself in the clutches of a painted lady. Oh, the horrors! This began to change in 1920 because the census revealed more people were living in the city than the country.
By the 1970s we had the movie Deliverance which showed the dangers that city folks faced in the rural backwoods. There were inbred mutants laying in wait, ever ready to cornhole you and maybe even bite your pecker off. Oh, the horrors!192
How did we get from Gomer Pyle, played by Jim Nabors in CBS “rural sitcoms,” to “Gomer Pyle” played by Vincent D’Onofrio in Full Metal Jacket?
It’s Connelly’s take on Kunstler that give us the clue: the Judaic dominance of both the liberal Left and the neo-conned Right.
It’s as if Mayberry were being fought over by two evil real estate interests. One, the Liberals, want to clean out the locals and replace them with students; here we find Kunstlerville and Stars Hollow and perhaps Zucotti Park. The other, the Right, wants to ship the jobs overseas and drive everyone to the trailer parks outside town, perhaps imprison what’s left, and have Trump build luxury condos financed by Wall Street.
What unites both is a more or less unspoken view of “those people” not as The People, salt of the earth—remember when political movements were proud to call themselves “populist”?—but as basically ignorant and potentially dangerous rural yahoos, a bunch of anti-Semites who don’t matter anyhow.
No wonder that when Charlie Sheen’s bête noire, Chuck Lorre, was looking for a way to instantly characterize Charlie’s character’s potential mother-in-law as far worse than his own mother (a manipulative WASP, of course) he made her a Midwesterner who announces her arrival by complaining about spending her flight “sitting next to some big Jew.”
The Wall Street Occupiers are the Gilmore Girls, en masse, hating Big Money but hating “the people”—you know, the “Tea Party morons”—just as much; the problem with having such refined standards is that it’s hard to make a revolution with just a handful of smart-mouthed hipsters as your constituency.
The Occupation-haters share their disdain for the People, though they are willing to be paid to pose as the People’s Tribunes; they love the Big Money—the 1%—who pay for their hypocrisy, and since Big Money already calls the shots, they don’t need no stinking revolution anyway.
In Godforsaken America, the Old Right’s dream of a nation of rooted communities of farmers and small business has been abandoned for Star Wars fantasies of high tech and globalization, and only survives now on the Left, in the distorted form of the Liberal’s dream of College Forever.
It was the future Senator Blutarsky who gave us the epitaph for Occupy Wall Street many years ago, in a movie—Animal House—that oddly enough seems to evoke both the preciosity of Stars Hollow real estate and the funky chaos of an OWS encampment: “Seven years of college down the drain.”
POSTSCRIPT
Readers may be aware that since this was written, the town of Stars Hollow has morphed into Portlandia, the eponymous setting of the “indie” comedy series on IFC. Portland is indeed the next turn of the screw, a Stars Hollow where everyone went to Yale, or at least took some courses in Postmodern Anthropology or Deconstructing Native American Cuisine at the community center.
The vibe from the opening credits is what Greg Johnson has identified as the root of “West Coast White Nationalism”; he notes that Seattle and Portland are the Whitest cities in America; the states of Washington and Oregon are among the Whitest as well. Yet they have preserved, from frontier days, a genuine openness to eccentricity that one doesn’t find in the usual Whitopias.
A sign, apparently official, exhorts “Keep Portland Weird,” but while we see some crusty old-timers, they seldom if ever show up in the skits; even the Mayor, played by weird-icon Kyle McLaughlin, runs off to join a reggae band.
No old-timers, no tradition-minded Mayor like Stars Hollow’s Doosie, and above all, no WASPy adults like Lorelei’s parents. Lacking that critical, “outsider” perspective (which the Left, and the Jews, supposedly value so highly), the series never rises to “White Nationalism” but only “Implicit Whiteness.” The jokes about homicidally aggressive cyclists and restaurants that offer personal introductions to the animal you will be eating show that, left to its own devices, political correctness will spiral into forms so obnoxious as to become fair game for satire even among the cultural Left; but that same lack of any old-timers or stuffy Establishment figures prevents any sense of an alternative—White but non-PC—from presenting itself.
If Lorelei and Rory ran a bookstore instead of an inn, they might eventually resemble the proprietresses of Women and Women First; but without her parents to politely tut-tut, the series would, like Portlandia, lack any historical context. That’s why Portlandia is a very funny sketch comedy series, and The Gilmore Girls is the 21st century equivalent of The Magnificent Ambersons, just like Welles would have wanted it: in color, and seven years long.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
November 21, 2011
“GOD, I’M WITH A HEATHEN.”
THE REBIRTH OF THE MÄNNERBUND IN
BRIAN DE PALMA’S THE UNTOUCHABLES
Brian De Palma’s 1987 film, from a script by David Mamet, is usually seen as a Hero’s Quest film, like Star Wars (or The Final Sacrifice), or at least an Epic of some sort,193 but I find it more interesting to see it as a film that, probably unconsciously, delineates the re-creation of the ancient Aryan Männerbund.194
WHAT IS THE MÄNNERBUND?
Although the study of the Männerbund dates to the 19th century, it was Hans Blüher who first championed its significance, using it first to analyze the German youth movement, the Wandervogel, and later as the key to a non-Freudian, indeed, anti-Freudian, understanding of civilization, especially that of the Aryans.195 Later, Julius Evola would incorporate the idea in his post-war writings on the origin and possibilities for the rebirth of the Aryan State.196
Today, the foremost exponent of the Männerbund is Wulf Grimsson, who has devoted several volumes to it, most recently Male Mysteries and the Secret of the Männerbund,197 where he delineates the idea thus:
The Männerbund is a system of social ties found in traditional Indo-European societies which is very difficult for men living in a modernist (and/or monotheistic) society to underst
and. . . . Among our Germanic ancestors these groups were composed of sexually mature male youths who under guidance of an elder formed a closed cult or society. They were dedicated to Odin, had special rites of pedagogical training, initiation and esoteric practise and combined the functions of a sorcerer or shaman and a warrior. To appreciate the importance of such a unit is difficult until we realize that the role of the blood brother and the Männerbund was seen as the foundation of Germanic society with the family unit of far less significance. This changes the whole structure of how we see archaic society when we realize that these societies held a virile warrior ethic based in male-male affection superior to family life.198
The Männerbund was a unique social and initiatory institution, it stood at the centre of the hierarchy of archaic society offering a path to initiation into the esoteric Mysteries and providing stability to the tribe below it. In comparison to the Third Function of the tribe and family the Männerbund was certainly an outsider institution yet it was this outsidernesss that allowed it to take such a significant role within the traditional hierarchy. It was not swayed by nepotism or by tribal or familial pressures; it was a separate, distinct and unique structure. It had a warrior ethic yet also trained scribes, shamans, rune masters and many others; it combined the First and Second Functions in a very special and profound way. . . . The bund was Androphilic in practice and focused on the unique bond created by blood brothers. These bonds continued even if a comrade left the Bund, the blood brother was the most significant bond even above that of a wife, family or the tribe. A brother would help another even at the cost of his life. The bond created with a blood brother would last till death, and it is considered by many, thereafter.199
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