A Miscellany For the Day After No Kings Day
I Wrote a Thing
A bit more about lifting and about Manliness, for Plough.
The Phoenician Scheme
Ashley and I saw The Phoenician Scheme the other day. Enjoyed it. My main thought was that I needed to listen to more Stravinsky — his work constitutes a lot of the film’s score, and I was repeatedly brought up short by it. I mostly know him as the Rite of Spring guy, all angles and slashes, and I didn’t know how lyrical he could be.
Asteroid City was Anderson’s Buddhist film; this is his Christian film. Rather overtly: one of the characters is a nun, and the plot is about a rich opportunist who ends up making a rather medieval gesture of penitence. Anderson is clearly exploring modes of renunciation. I guess that’s always been true — even as far back as Bottle Rocket his movies are about guys who nail their identities to big plans and schemes that don’t come off, and they have tended to end with those guys transformed by their own newfound ability to accept defeat with grace. That’s Max Fisher in a nutshell, and Royal Tenenbaum, as much as it is this film’s Zsa-Zsa Korda. Anderson is just endlessly rewriting The Tempest; he loves the moment when you throw your spell books into the sea.
De Profundis Clamato, “Testicules Meus Gargarrite”
Every time it becomes clear that Trump’s supporters may actually get what many of them want — a government that, through what it practices and (maybe more this) what it encourages and allows, basically declares open season on anyone to their left — I feel sad and stressed for about half an hour, and I think wistfully about all the things I want to do with my life that I’ll still (let’s be real) probably get to do — there are no limits on this regime’s nastiness but there are lots of limits on its follow-through and its practical power — but that I just may not get to do, because though the chances I’ll get shot at some anodyne liberal protest are still very very low they used to be essentially zero.
And then, from deep in my being, a voice cries, These people can gargle my balls.
I do not know what the source of this inner voice is, but it speaks powerfully, and consistently, and the warmth of its timbre gives me strength. It restoreth my soul. It is the spiritual equivalent of those hangover cures Jeeves used to make Bertie Wooster.
I recommend this motto to all of you — perhaps especially those of you who cannot say it literally, which makes it funnier.
Buckley, Cont’d
I continue to enjoy the Sam Tanenhaus William F. Buckley biography as much as I expect to enjoy any book this year. I have not been so entertained by people I despise since I read all of Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time in a hurry.1
I expected that the book would have some relevance to one of my abiding preoccupations, which is “what do we do about our horrible media environment.” I did not expect it to be this relevant. Joke’s on me.
One standard story about Buckley is that he reinvented and revitalized conservatism by chasing out all the really embarrassing conservatives: the prewar anti-semites and fascists and the Eisenhower is a Communist Agent guys. This doesn’t hold water. His magazine published open anti-semites like Joe Sobran, and it rabidly supported Franco and Pinochet among other fascists. He spent years building up the John Birchers before they got too embarrasing for him. Also, as Tanenhaus’s research makes clear, Buckley and his family were strong supporters of the America First movement and personally highly anti-semitic, though WFB supposedly partly outgrew this last later in life. Two of Buckley’s sisters burned a cross on a Jewish business’s lawn. Buckley basically broke up a romantic relationship between one of his sisters and a Jewish school friend of his: It isn’t done, old boy. I find it hard to convey the amount of disgust these people evoke in me. If the Buckley family had been in charge, the US might have allied with Hitler’s Germany in a war of extermination against the Soviet Union, but we would never have taken part in the destruction of the Nazi, fascist, and imperial cults. A political philosophy that would have interrupted one of America’s indisputably great moments — actually both of them, because a nineteenth-century Buckley would never have freed the slaves or fought for the Union — is empty. Full stop. For me, there is nothing else to say about the substance of his beliefs or his political thought, unless these had changed in some fundamental way.
Which they never did. He found other racial groups that filled him with a greater disgust; he found new Strong Dads to rally around. But he was always a nationalist in Orwell’s sense:
By “nationalism” I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled “good” or “bad.” But secondly – and this is much more important – I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.
“Nation or other unit” is important here. Conservatism is associated in the popular mind with “patriotism” — an association that somehow persists even when conservative politicians openly state their hatred of so many distinct American groups (city dwellers, liberals, leftists, queer people of various stripes, black people they don’t personally vibe with, Latinos they don’t personally vibe with, the majority of women, people who aren’t nominally Christian, people who are so Christian that they oppose being ruled by misanthropic freaks) that the total ends up an overwhelming majority of actually existing Americans. The America that Donald Trump loves doesn’t exist; it’s a projection of his ego. But that’s the unit that he’s nationalistic about. Orwell goes on:
Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. ... By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.
A question that I’ve kept asking myself throughout the book is what Buckley actually stands for.