“Color-blinded” into oblivion, doomed to walk a country their ancestors created without a territory to call home; A fitting epitaph for white Americans.289
After all, if we are “White-guilty” for acts we haven’t done, then nothing should stop us from acts involving any additional “real” guilt.
Above all, and in the end, the island resembles NS Germany, because, like most utopias, it must be destroyed at the end. Of course, like tragic lovers, this obviates any anti-climactic petering out in reality; ending on a high note, as it were; better to burn out than fade away. The Savage in Brave New World commits suicide, the Island of Pala is invaded by oil interests backed by a local tyrant, Kurtz’s command is terminated to the tune of the Doors “The End.”
But the destruction of John’s island goes even further, utterly annihilated and sunk by some kind of deliberate super-reactor explosion, an act of fiery mass suicide (again, an inversion of accepted history, where the “good” Allies used atomic weapons homicidally against the “bad” guys) that inevitably calls to mind the Götterdämmerung chosen by Hitler. “From our point of view it is better for our colony to be destroyed than to be enslaved by any alien Power.”
And reverting to Burroughs’ utopia again, here is how Timothy Murphy describes the denouement there:
The novel concludes with a chapter entitled “The Wild Boys Smile,” which is also the last line of the text. In it, an unidentified narrator (perhaps Audrey, who is pronounced dead in the penultimate Penny Arcade Peep Show, or Rogers from “The Chief Smiles”) joins the Wild Boys in their struggle for the streets. . . . At the conclusion of the chapter, the narrator and his companion, confronted by policemen and photographers at the “time barrier” (WB 181) that separates the Wild Boys’ “dead” world from our “live” historical world, escape by throwing a film grenade at them; this grenade, like the novel itself, is meant to blow a hole in the ideological “reality film” that controls social reproduction (as well as the producers) under the existent socius. After it goes off, we are left with the final fading images in the Penny Arcade Peep Show—naked boys fucking, laughing, and gaming—as the Peep Show (and the novel itself) burns out: “The silver screen is exploding in moon craters and boiling silver spots. ‘Wild boys very close now.’
Darkness falls on the ruined suburbs. A dog barks in the distance. Dim jerky stars are blowing away across a gleaming empty sky, the wild boys smile.” (WB 184)
Murphy then points out the usefulness of such apparently cataclysmic endings:
Since they must forget power if they are to avoid duplicating it, the Wild Boys cannot smile in triumph over their enemies. Instead they smile in invitation to the reader; such an invitation is precisely what the book of the dead must offer if it is to be a viable subject-group fantasy.290
Again, one thinks of Savitri Devi; the National Socialists may not have been able to triumph, in the conditions of the Kali Yuga, but their example remains to inspire our own efforts.291
The National Socialist angle may bring to mind another book, Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus. Mann’s work is also a fictional biography, written by a childhood friend whose love for his subject almost makes up for a considerable intellectual disparity—Serenus Zeitblom might have better reason to be called “Fido” than John’s narrator. While John stages his Götterdämmerung in 1935, Adrian Leverkuhn dies in 1941, but only after a Nietzschean decade of mental collapse. The latter is the result of a “devil’s bargain”—hence the title—in his youth, in which he deliberately acquires syphilis from a prostitute so as to supercharge his musical creativity.292
John and his kind need no such aid, being in a sense born infected, but the result is the same—prolonged adolescence, uncanny creativity, and a moral sense that several characters, and even the narrator, call “satanic” and “devilish.” There is the same eerie music-making.
Above all, Leverkuhn’s career is intended by Mann as a typically heavy-handed allegory for Germany’s fall (or rise, as some of us might prefer) into Nazism. As we’ve seen before (e.g., Green Lantern) to the Christian—even a lukewarm “lover of the humanities” such as Zeitblom or Mann himself—the Superman can only be seen as Satanic. As Mann says, theology inevitably becomes demonology.293
And yet, Mann, like Stapledon, has to resort to the favorite meme of the Satanic Nietzsche or Hitler, namely genetics, race, the Superman. Is it possible, that one must inevitably avail oneself of such language, if on wishes to speak at all?
Lester Bangs once wrote that Lou Reed was constantly lying because he took so much speed that he’d run out of things to say if he stuck to the truth. Perhaps that’s the function of political correctness—a concept invented by Stapledon’s beloved Soviets—to keep thought from its . . . um . . . natural, genetically sound paths.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right,
November 12, 2013
FROM ODD JOHN TO
STRANGE LOVE
Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Director: Stanley Kubrick; written by Peter George, Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern
Columbia Pictures (1964)
GENERAL “BUCK” TURGIDSON: Hmm . . . Strangelove? What kind of a name is that? That ain’t no Kraut name is it, Stainesey?
MR. STAINES: He changed it when he became a citizen. Used to be “Merkwürdigliebe.”
GENERAL “BUCK” TURGIDSON: Well, a Kraut by any other name, uh Stainesey?
The German word “Gemeinschaft” means “A spontaneously arising organic social relationship characterized by strong reciprocal bonds of sentiment and kinship within a common tradition.” In this context the discussion of the post-apocalypse society living in mine shafts at the end of the film presents an interesting double-entendre. Dr. Strangelove’s remarks about the participants in the new society spontaneously accepting new social norms and having “bold curiosity for the adventure ahead” is especially germane. Also, General Turgidson’s admonition to “not allow a mine shaft gap” at the end is a particularly vivid pun.294
Toward the end of my reflections on Olaf Stapledon’s queer utopia, Odd John, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb put in a brief appearance. I think a closer look at how the movie appears in the light of our reflections would be interesting.
I would suggest that despite its status as a classic “black comedy,” and whatever the intentions of its creators to reveal the modern world as a dystopia, the film can be seen as presenting a series of increasingly perfected—though somewhat claustrophobic—utopian Männerbünde.295
Each is a group of men (with one small exception to the rule296), cut off from the rest of the world, operating by its own rules. As we’ll see, the B-52 is a closed tube in the upper atmosphere, with oxygen masks for emergencies; we only see it open up when Maj. Kong forces open the bomb bay doors to his doom. Burbleson Air Force Base is, cinematically, nothing but Gen. Ripper’s office—even his en suite bathroom is unseen—with some second unit cut-aways to show the storming attack. Then there’s Gen. Turgidson’s motel room, followed by The War Room, which is obviously sealed off and perhaps underground; Turgidson freaks when the Russian Ambassador enters (“He’ll see the Big Board!”); then Strangelove’s mine shaft vision.
Each unit includes one outsider, like “Fido” at John’s colony: RAF Captain Mandrake, Turgidson’s female “assistant,” James Earl Jones as the anachronistic black pilot,297 and the Russian Ambassador whose appearance in the War Room freaks out Turgidson.
Additionally, each utopian segment ends with a symbolic ejaculation, a destructive opening to the outside: the iconic scene of Maj. Kong riding the bomb down; “Bat” Guano shoots the Coke machine and gets a spurt of soda in the face; Turgidson’s last words in the motel room are “Blast off!”; a climactic pie-fight was cut from the War Room scene, which now ends with the compulsively saluting Strangelove rising erect from his wheelchair; his utopian vision ends with the equally ico
nic montage of phallic mushroom clouds.
Each, in some sense, fails, but as we’ve seen with Odd John, this is just a genre convention of utopian writing; the final group will succeed beyond its own imagination. And each climaxes with a big smile.298
For once, TV Tropes has got it exactly wrong:
World Gone Mad: Every single group of people are various sorts of insane, incompetent, and/or incapable of focusing on the important subject at hand. Except for the bomber crew, who are all well-trained and manage to adapt to the various obstacles in their path. Too bad they’re the one group that desperately needs to fail.299
1. BURPLESON AIR FORCE BASE
GROUP CAPT. LIONEL MANDRAKE: Colonel! Colonel, I must know what you think has been going on here! […]
COLONEL “BAT” GUANO: I think you’re some kind of deviated prevert. I think General Ripper found out about your preversion, and that you were organizing some kind of mutiny of preverts. Now MOVE!
Or in practice, the executive office of Base Commander Gen. Jack D. Ripper. Apart from a couple cutaways during the Army’s attempt to retake the base, and the business with the Coke machine and the telephone booth in the corridor, we are entirely within Gen. Ripper’s private realm. Although the rugby balls and Greek grammars have been replaced with bombs, rifles, and bullets . . .
GROUP CAPT. LIONEL MANDRAKE: Shoot it off! Shoot! With a gun! That’s what the bullets are for, you twit!
. . . the atmos’ is more like a British public school. Gen. Ripper commands not men but “my boys.”
GENERAL “BUCK” TURGIDSON: [reading Gen. Ripper’s last communication] “My boys will give you the best kind of start, 1,400 megatons worth, and you sure as hell won’t stop them now.”
There’s even intra-mural rivalry: “General Turgidson, with all due respect for your defense team my boys can brush them aside without too much trouble.”
And while the base troops do eventually surrender—“My boys let me down”300—we’ll see that at least one plane in the Attack Wing will get through.
GENERAL “BUCK” TURGIDSON: Mr. President, if I may speak freely, the Russkie talks big, but frankly, we think he’s short of know-how. I mean, you just can’t expect a bunch of ignorant peons to understand a machine like some of our boys. . . . if the pilot’s good, see, I mean, if he’s really . . . sharp, he can barrel that baby in so low [he spreads his arms like wings and laughs], you oughtta see it sometime, it’s a sight. A big plane like a ’52. VRROOM! There’s jet exhaust, fryin’ chickens in the barnyard.
PRESIDENT MERKIN MUFFLEY: Yeah, but has he got a chance?
GENERAL “BUCK” TURGIDSON: Has he got a chance? Hell, Ye . . . ye . . .
So Peter Sellers’ role as Group Captain Mandrake, ex-RAF pilot, is quite appropriate here. He’s a slightly slow on the uptake senior boy, getting some private tutoring from the Headmaster;301 it’s a reversal of the Boy’s Own Mag world of Stalky & Co., where the playing fields of Eton have simply become the theatre of war.
BASE COMMANDER JACK D. RIPPER: Mandrake, in the name of Her Majesty and the Continental Congress come here and feed me this belt, boy!
The lesson Ripper imparts is, of course, his famous “purity of essence” meme, the original “conspiracy theory.”302 Along the way, though, he gives Mandrake a history lesson that will become important at the end:
GENERAL JACK D. RIPPER: Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war?
GROUP CAPT. LIONEL MANDRAKE: No, I don’t think I do, sir, no.
GENERAL JACK D. RIPPER: He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
As Trevor Lynch has noted on several occasions: in the modern world, only madmen are allowed to articulate the truth.303
Burpleson is ultimately taken back by the Army, and General Ripper, true to the public school ethos, “does the right thing, old chap” and commits suicide.304 This is the darkest utopia (note the cinematography) but even so, it’s, as we’ve said before, only a genre convention, not an admission of defeat.305 Indeed, we’ll see that Ripper’s vision—rule by the elite—will come to pass.
To lighten the mood, and provide the real ending, we have Mandrake’s monkeying around with the pay phone, and “Bat” Guano’s encounter with the Coke machine. It’s the audience that can be expected to smile when “Bat” fires his rifle and gets a Coke facial in return—“a Coke and a smile,” as the ad would say a few years later.306 Meanwhile, the utopian, anti-economic scarcity note is again sounded as Mandrake doesn’t have enough money for the phone, and “Bat” sneers at the idea of “going into combat with loose change in my pocket.”
1A. THE MOTEL ROOM
The Motel Room is an odd little scene, that does little but show us Gen. Turgidson being summoned to the War Room in the midst of a tryst with his “assistant.” It’s as much a closed environment as Ripper’s office—later we’ll see Ripper enter the bathroom to shoot himself, here Turgidson enters the scene from the bathroom. More connections: Premier Kissoff will be caught in a similar tryst during the War Room scene, and the General’s “assistant” will turn up in the Playboy centerfold viewed by a crew member onboard “The Leper Colony” (her ass covered with an issue of Foreign Affairs, nudge nudge) and presumably is the unwanted caller to Turgidson in the War Room . . .
GENERAL “BUCK” TURGIDSON: I told you never to call me here, don’t you know where I am? . . . Well look, baby, I c-, I can’t talk to you now . . . my president needs me!
. . . but otherwise it has little to do with the rest of the film. I suspect it’s here to establish Gen. Turgidson’s, and by extension the rest of the “boys’” hetero cred; otherwise we might be suspicious, since he contemns Kissoff for his tryst as a “degenerate” (another “prevert” for the “Leper Colony” no doubt) and other than shouting “Blast off!” he doesn’t seem to have much interest in Miss Foreign Affairs, preferring to answer the call of his President.
2. “THE LEPER COLONY”
The men will cheer and the boys will shout
The ladies they will all turn out
And we’ll all feel gay
When Johnny comes marching home.
The B-52 and the War Room are the most famous segments. I say “the” B-52 since although Ripper clearly orders a “wing attack,” and we see dozens of vectors on The Big Board,307 but only one plane is ever shown. The B-52 is code-named “The Leper Colony,” which “designates the crew as incompetent, even degenerate,”308 but also sounds Odd John’s themes of island utopias of physically deformed social outcasts that seem retarded but get lots of high-tech things done.
MAJOR T. J. “KING” KONG: Stay on the bomb run boys, I’m gonna get those bomb doors open if it harelips everyone on Bear Creek.309
As IMDb noted above, the crew is actually quite competent, even heroic and self-sacrificing; an ideal Männerbund. It’s impossible not to be rooting for them, and unlike IMDb, I think Counter-Currents readers, at least, will find their goal quite admirable. And what Aryan male wouldn’t want to go out riding an ICBM onto Laputa?310
The precise function of Plan R, and the CRM 114 coding device, which is not to be able to receive, recalls Odd John’s use of psychic techniques to confuse anyone—as here, both Soviets and Brits—nosing around the island. We can’t tell from the angle but he might be taking his iconic bomb ride on the one designated “Dear [Odd?] John.”
3. THE WAR ROOM
The culminating utopia, in many senses, is of course the War Room. Several of the themes we’ve noted are tied together here. It’s a macho environment where women only intrude from the outside: first, Gen. Turgidson receives an unwanted call fro
m (presumably) the woman—his secretary, not his wife—we saw him with earlier (in another closed environment—a motel room—where another unwanted call sends him to the War Room).
GENERAL “BUCK” TURGIDSON: I told you never to call me here, don’t you know where I am? . . . Well look, baby, I c-, I can’t talk to you now . . . my president needs me!
Then, to bring the Russian premier to the Hot Line requires the Ambassador to reveal his secret rendezvous:
RUSSIAN AMBASSADOR: Our Premier is a man of the people, but he is also . . . a man, if you follow my meaning.
Gen. Turgidson erupts with outrage at the Premier being a “degenerate atheist commie!” which is odd, since, apart from the hypocrisy, the Ambassador’s comment should be lessening the homoerotic implications of Turgidson’s spurning his girlfriend to serve his President’s needs.
Perhaps he is offended by the implication of Kissoff (note the name) actually consummating the act, since Turgidson never seems to:
GENERAL “BUCK” TURGIDSON: I know how it is, baby. Tell you what you do: you just start your countdown, and old Bucky’ll be back here before you can say “Blast off!”
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