Green Nazis in Space: New Essays in Literature, Art, and Culture
Page 8
5. “[U]niversalization, through a planetary extension of a model of society postulated implicitly as the only rational possibility and thus as superior.”
The implicit assumption of Miss Brodie’s whole program, creating little models of herself and sending them forth; she may say she “educates” in accordance with the etymology of “drawing out what is within” but actually assumes that “inner” content to be identical with herself, or else to be discarded; “all people are equal, except when they disagree with me, in which case they are merely stupid or sick, and may be taken out of consideration.” Indeed, her very discussion of the issue itself illustrates this: hers is “the only correct understanding of the word.”
In short, Miss Brodie is no Fascist (although technically she may be a quote-fascist-unquote) but rather the adumbration of a then-new type, very familiar to us today: the withered old Methodist-Presbyterian-raised but now secularly righteous Public Scolds. Like Hilary Clinton, for example.
Or consider Nancy Pelosi, La Passionara de San Francisco, who tells us that: “[I]t doesn’t matter so much who wins the election, because we have shared values about the education of our children . . . elections shouldn’t matter as much as they do.”183
These are the women, not the “fascist” skinheads, who are sending our girls and boys to their deaths to “fight injustice” in every shithole on the planet.
It’s pretty counter-stereotypical. Women’s suffrage was originally justified in part on the grounds that women were less likely to vote for war. But Clinton, Power, and Rice all come out of the Clinton-era ideological tradition of hawkish humanitarian interventionism.
It’s also interesting to recall that Power had to resign from the Obama campaign after calling Clinton a “monster” in what she thought was an off-the-record interview. Now they’re teaming up. The “stereotype” is woman=liberal=good, which lies behind the idea that a Miss Brodie must be a nasty “fascist”; and, as a spinster and even an “unconscious Lesbian,” she’s not even a real woman, so there! Of course, that part’s a bit behind the times now. And for “humanitarian interventionism” read: Totalitarian Humanism. As for a “monster,” is that not exactly how we are supposed to regard Miss Brodie?
Although Benoist doesn’t mention sexual “liberation,” viewing Brodie as PC avant la lettre even makes sense of her batty molestation/adultery/voyeurism scheme; isn’t that just exactly the sort of “enlightened” brainstorm some Bloomsbury type would dream up, to the cynical guffaws of a Lytton Strachey? Keynes’ (another Bloomsberry, let us not forget) infamous “In the long run we are all dead” might be taken as the male version of Miss Brodie’s dictum “I am in my prime!”
One is also reminded of a similar triple play idea dreamed up by the supposedly “sensible wife” in The Big Chill; another group of mis-educated PC losers, one dead, all bemoaning their bad but sophisticated life choices and pontificating wildly.184 Here’s a very Brodie exchange:
Don’t you have any music from this century?
There’s no other music here.
Now we see exactly why Miss Brodie insinuates herself into an established school, not a “crank school.” And why she selects only pupils whose parents are either too disinterested to care about what she teaches their girls, or enlightened enough to agree with her. Either way, the perfect subjects of PC indoctrination, with none of those pesky “Right-wing” buttinskis to get in the way.
It’s interesting, is it not, that our own “highly educated elites” are constantly bemoaning the paltry results of our educational institutions, and rightly so; yet it is also clear that they link, more or less explicitly, “education” with adherence to their ideology, and “lack of education” with any residual traces of “bad old” ideas. This despite the easily attested fact that the “well-educated man” (in Evola’s phrase) of the bad old days held precisely these opinions.
Evola, I suppose, is a lost cause, but read some “patron saint of free speech” like Mencken or even as far back as Voltaire, and see how they freely spoke about “noble savages” or Jews or “the feminine” or any other hobbyhorse of the PC Left.
The standard reply of the half-mis-educated (Shaw) Negro on the Internet, “You ray-cists beez ig-nor-ant” not only serves as a summation of this “education=liberal cant” meme, but we could also imagine it to have been spoken, in both content and grammar, by one of Miss Brodie’s Girls.
And yes, despite their “we’re so smart” blather, even turning out students who count on their fingers is quite compatible with the Liberal Project. Is not Liberalism the doctrine of the Public Sector? And is not the Public Sector, as James Jackson reminds us, “[T]the chief vehicle by which the witless, the retarded, and the pathologically lazy can find employment. They produce nothing, they do nothing, they mean nothing. It is why the political left embraces them and why they in turn cling to the political left—all at the poor bloody taxpayer’s expense.”185
Yes, girls, enter the warm embrace of Miss Brodie! She has selected you, so you must be Special! And your parents will silently foot the bill!
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
January 23, 2011
TO CUT-UP A MOCKINGBIRD:
HARPER LEE’S GO SET A WATCHMAN
Harper Lee
Go Set a Watchman
Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2015
“I almost don’t care what the critics say as long as I can write another one.”186
“Mockingbird is a classic, but you’ve probably read it before, and it’s no more relevant to your future legal career than 12 Angry Men is to picking a jury. They’re both realist presentations written through idealist, dramatic glasses.”187
On Friday night, a comedian died in New York. Somebody knows why. Down there, somebody knows . . .
No, wait, sorry—wrong Watchman, wrong pop culture meme.188
Constant Readers who recall my inability to join the teenage cult of Tolkien will not be surprised to hear that I have never read (Nelle) Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, nor seen the film. It seems to be the sort of pious claptrap that “everyone” reads, and I just can’t stomach.189
In any event, I never read “the original.” For all I know, it may have been “assigned,” but in that case I didn’t read it either—a not infrequent occurrence in my slapdash schooldays.190
Nor can I be bothered to figure out the conflicting, Rashomon-like accounts of just what relation this book bears to the sainted classic.191
Relying on the redoubtable Margot Metroland’s account of the hidden genesis of Mockingbird,192 I think we can say that what we have here is close to the original MS Lee submitted, before the editors told her to junk the narrative of present-day, 26-year-old Jean Louise, write more about the recollections of 6-year-old Jean (“Scout”) into the main narrative,193 expand the rape trial into the moral and narrative centerpiece, and for God’s sake cut all the talk about racism, pro and con.
And I don’t propose to read it now, so here’s your special treat: a review by someone with no preconceived ideas about the story, or vested interest in preserving blessed childhood illusions. And the death of childhood illusions is what the book is about.
Well, it’s an enjoyable if forgettable read, written with an intelligent though not flashy style. The editors who read this and ordered a complete re-write were, I think, wrong, although with two years on the best seller list, a Pulitzer Prize, and a hit movie, it’s hard to argue with them; perhaps they “sensed” they could make something more out of it. The experience, however, did seem to sour Ms. Lee on the whole writing thing.
Oh, but then there’s also the horrible “racism” of the first draft. That issue is perhaps best handled while looking at the style itself, the unity of style and message being itself a sign of the talent behind the writing.
On her first Sunday back in her childhood home, Jean Louise of course attends church with her family. The church organist essays the doxology at a faster, High Church tempo, and the
congregation sticks to their lugubrious Southern Baptist rendition. This leads to a stern rebuke from Uncle Jack after services, where we learn that the music director has just got back from choir camp, where the leader—from New Jersey, no less—has given him a whole list of supposed “improvements” for the church’s music.194 He’s dubious, and the stubborn resistance of even worldly, bachelor aesthete Jack—who drops the Catholic phrase “D. V.” which he glosses for Jean as “God willin’” and seems tailor-made for this kind of “smells and bells”—convinces him he’s right to drop the whole matter.
It may seem like a delaying tactic—come on, make with the inbred racism already!—but it neatly encapsulates the whole position the South finds itself in—stubbornly resisting “improvement” suggested—or demanded—by the North, in the name of preserving local traditions.195
As we move on, apart from a few flashback sequences that are apparently the origin of the more assertively 1930s content of Mockingbird, we meet various characters in what is to today’s readers now their twenty years later form,196 and Jean Louise, fresh from another year’s stay in New York,197 is horrified each time by some new—to her, at least—manifestation of “racism.”
Aunt Alexandra is a splendid creation, all corsets and scented face powder, the very embodiment of the Southern Way of Life (“They endured” as Faulkner would say).198 Appropriately, then, she gets to deliver some of Lee’s toughest “racist” lines, as do Scout’s former gal pals: “Keeping a nigger happy these days is like catering to a king . . .”
The men are a different story, weak and temporizing. Uncle Dr. Jack is a bachelor eccentric, living in a literary 19th century of the mind, and delivers a rambling, evasive, analogy-ridden defense that Steve Sailer could put in one sentence: a race is a large extended family that occasionally practices incest. He evidences the “we acknowledge some problems but we’re still proud of our land and its traditions” attitude currently under attack by those banning the Confederate battle flag and digging up the bones of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Hank, Jean Louis’ intended, is revealed a monster of social conformity that compares well with Lane, Franny’s obtuse boyfriend in Franny and Zooey. He sullies Jack’s views by adding a strong dollop of Babbitty “get along to go along” but then, like Clarice Starling, he’s only a generation away from trash.199
Finally, she confronts the Big Guy himself, Atticus, her father and, as a result of the subsequent book and film, apparently most of (White) America’s father. And now the book’s big shock: Atticus is a racist!
At first they reach common ground on rejecting the Court’s judicial overreaching, effectively repealing the 10th Amendment. This, of course, is already enough to sicken today’s Liberal. But what follows will scare the pants off them.
“Jean Louise,” he said. “Have you ever considered that you can’t have a set of backward people living among people advanced in one kind of civilization and have a social Arcadia?”
“Let’s look at it this way . . . You realize that our Negro population is backward, don’t you? You will concede that? You realize the full implications of the word ‘backward,’ don’t you? . . . You realize that the vast majority of them here in the South are unable to share fully in the responsibilities of citizenship, and why?”
“Now think about this. What would happen if all the Negroes in the South were suddenly given full civil rights? I’ll tell you. There’d be another Reconstruction. Would you want your state governments run by people who won’t know how to run ‘em? Do you want this town run by—now wait a minute—Willoughby’s a crook, we know that, but do you know of any Negro who knows as much as Willoughby? Zeebo’d probably be Mayor of Maycomb. Would you want someone of Zeebo’s capability to handle the town’s money? We’re outnumbered, you know . . . They vote in blocs.
“[T]he Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people . . . The NAACP doesn’t care whether a Negro . . . tries to learn a trade and stand on his own two feet—oh no, all the NAACP cares about is that man’s vote.”
And so on. The Guardian, bringing the frisson of distaste one might bring to, say, scraping a squashed raccoon off the driveway, finds the offense of Lee in her recourse to “biological determinism,” not just to account for racism but even for her own superiority, explaining that she was just “born color blind.”200
My readers, however, may find all this rather tepid. Atticus is simply what we would today call a “race realist,”201 with a dash of paternalism thrown in. But as The Guardian sternly advises us, both paternalism and “color-blindness” are badthinking today. To the modern Liberal, the more or less fierce confrontations between the Northernized Scout and her Southern role models are like arguments between the inmates of some racial insane asylum—a rather Southern Gothic notion at that.
Neither Atticus nor Scout convinces the other, of course, and Uncle Jack is brought back to cobble together a kind of “higher” moral position: take no man as your infallible moral guide, and recognize and honor the human fallibility in all of us.
The moral, if you will, is not one that will sit well with the Liberal either. Smash your idols? Kill the Buddha on the road? Sounds good, since the Liberal, like the proverbial college sophomore, only imagines smashing his own parents at the Thanksgiving table, not himself; that is, smashing idols by attacking and silencing them, not questioning his own views.
What does a bigot do when he meets someone who challenges his opinions? He doesn’t give. He stays rigid. Doesn’t even try to listen, just lashes out.
In short, the Liberal is as bigoted as any Klansman. What Uncle Jack means by tolerance is something rather different:
“Good grief, baby, people don’t agree with the Klan, but they certainly don’t try to prevent them from puttin’ on sheets and making fools of themselves in public.”
Well, these days “they” certainly do, most certainly, and that applies to a lot of things Uncle Jack couldn’t imagine anyone being crazy enough to believe could happen, such as flying the state flag, too. After all, some things are Just Wrong and someone—preferably the Government—should Do Something About It; otherwise, you’re As Bad as They Are.
You could call what Jack and Atticus espouse, and bring Scout back to a grudging acceptance of, Olde Tyme Liberalism, I suppose, just as Atticus calls himself a “Jeffersonian Democrat” although, as Jean Louise points out, he voted for Eisenhower.202
You could also call his views on race “olde tyme Liberalism,” too. Atticus believes that the negro is a childlike race, but he also believes in Progress: the negro can grow into his role in a modern society; the NAACP and the other Liberal busybodies are trying to force not only Southern society but the negro himself into too fast a rate of change. The stir-up negroes are more dissatisfied with their lot than ever, sullen and by turns demanding and ungrateful; a condition easily observed today. The ancient family retainer, Calpurnia, Scout’s surrogate mother, now barely recognizes her, seeing only just another White oppressor.
If this is indeed what Lee wrote some 50 or 60 years ago, or close to it, and looking at today’s Birmingham, a disaster,203 or Selma, where a movie celebrating the “victory” of MLK there fifty years ago can’t be shown, since all the movie theaters, along with most every other business, are closed, one can only applaud her prescience.204
But let’s stick with this theme, as the intertwining of theme and style illustrates the perhaps unconsciously subtle style that Lee brings to the novel.
Those who have made the transition away from the modern dogmas of Liberal goodthinking often use the metaphor, derived from They Live!, of being able to see.205 And so during their final confrontation, Atticus frequently asks Scout to see, to look around, and to open her eyes. “Let’s look at it this way . . .”
Scout, as we’ve seen, diagnoses herself as “born color-blind,” which she of course thinks is a good thing, while Atticus tries to convince her that it its, in fact, a handicap.206
“You must see things as
they are, as well as they should be.”207
“See” occurs, with varying tenses, dozens of times in the course of the novel,208 along with synonyms like “look” or “watch.”209 Indeed, the latter is the chief symbol of the book, occurring in the title and inserted way back at that early chapter at church, where in the sermon text JHVH “sets a watchman” and Scout later muses, “Mr. Stone set a watchman in church yesterday. He should have provided me with one. I need a watchman to lead me around and declare what he seeth every hour on the hour.”210
As Uncle Jack says, in his convoluted “literary” way, and in what would appear to be the book’s moral: “Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscience.”211
This, of course, is why the modern Liberal has abandoned the “Watchman” metaphor, with its “biological determinism,” for one which emphasizes the passive, docile role of the masses: The Guardian. You must not see, you must be taught.212
Speaking of conscience, that reminiscence about Scout’s falsies flap that Ms. Metroland singled out for enjoyment also contains an interesting lead related to sight: the insight that Atticus “wouldn’t be above throwing a little dust in a juryman’s eyes.” As she noted in her discussion of Mockingbird, in the famous rape trial