Category: Culture

Art, music, literature and thespianism

Working Towards A Conservative Democracy

Conservatism, Culture, Modernism, Politics

We are constantly being reminded that the United States is a representative republic (which it is) as well as being a liberal democracy (which is also true).  For the longest time, I’ve had the gnawing suspicion that the two concepts may be antithetical, nay even contradictory, and recent events have proven me correct.

The standard-bearers of the modern liberal democracy have tended towards the “liberal” part of the description, and their modernism has turned liberalism away from its classical roots (the Enlightenment) towards a more baleful and statist, ergo illiberal  ethos.  It is small wonder, therefore, that this modern liberalism is attacking both the “representative” and even “republic” towards a full democracy, into a government created by a national popular vote instead of a democracy limited by proportional representation.  (The sudden popularity of socialism — one of the more repressive governmental systems, is simply indicative of this intent, and the “democratic” prefix attached thereto is, like most of socialism, a figleaf to mask its true purpose.)

It seems clear that if we are to reverse this trend, we need to try to implement an antithetical alternative to the liberal democracy — that antithesis being a conservative democracy, as explained here by Yoram Hazony. I’m pretty sure that few if any conservative small-r republicans will take issue with this principle, for example:

Liberals regard the laws of a nation as emerging from the tension between positive law and the pronouncements of universal reason, as expressed by the courts. Conservatives reject the supposed universal reason of judges, which often amounts to little more than acceding to passing fashion. But conservatives also oppose an excessive regard for isolated written documents, which leads, for example, to the liberal mythology of America as a “creedal nation” (or a “propositional nation”), defined solely by certain abstractions found in the American Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address. Important though these documents are, they cannot substitute for the Anglo-American political tradition as a whole—with its roots in Scripture and the English common law—which alone offers a complete picture of the English and American legal inheritance.

Yes.  The famous expression on the Statue of Liberty “Give me your tired, your huddled masses…” etc. is a lovely sentiment, but it is not policy  which allows untrammeled immigration, nor does it confer a “right to immigrate to the United States” upon the rest of the world’s populace.

Read the whole thing.  It’s really long, but it has to be — overturning a liberal democracy and reverting to a conservative one does not lend itself to bumper-sticker aphorisms so beloved by the Left.

And overturn it we must, in order to return to the proud Anglo-Saxon heritage that is the foundation of our Western civilization.

Afterthought:  note the emphasis placed on religion — most specifically, Christian religion — by Hazony.  I should point out that I, an atheist, have absolutely no issue with it.  I am a conservative first, an atheist second, and I treasure the Christian values of our heritage and their foundation of our culture.  That said, the values I treasure are also the traditional  aspects of Christianity and not the modern-day travesty they have become.  My conservatism is all-embracing.

Blast From The Past: Right And Wrong

Culture, Essays

Right And Wrong

January 8, 2006

I watched the movie of Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent this morning, and through all the legal twists and turns, I found the most egregious twist to be that innocence is relative, guilt is sometimes not guilt, and perverting the law is okay if it helps someone else.

Of course, Scott Turow is a lawyer, so all these things are to be expected.

Plot summary: A DA has a fling with some female lawyer, she’s found dead, and he’s accused of the murder even though we know he didn’t do it. The evidence against him is substantial, but he’s eventually found not guilty. Then [plot twist warning], he discovers that his own wife actually killed the woman, and planted all the evidence, thinking that it’s so thin that he’ll never be accused of it—but of course, he is, and it’s only through some skullduggery that the evidence against him disappears, during which time we discover that the dead tramp was a Truly Evil & Corrupt Person (which, clearly, makes her murder sorta-okay), and the prosecution aren’t angels either, being pretty corrupt themselves (which also exonerates the defense’s wrongdoings).  (There’s a huge gaping hole in the plot, by the way, but that’s not relevant to the point of all this.)

The end of the movie has wifey confessing the crime to him. He doesn’t turn her in, of course, and the voice-over (his) which closes the movie says that he’s not going to deprive his son of his mother, and he’ll have to suffer the torment of knowing that he’s living with a murderer.

Am I the only one who thinks that this is relativist nonsense?

I am reminded of the real-life FBI agent in (I think) North Carolina who discovered that his own son had killed someone. Rather than protecting his son, which he could have done simply by keeping his silence, the FBI agent turned him in, even knowing that his own son might fry in the chair or go to jail forever. Now thatwould have made a good morality play, and a fine movie, because every single parent could say to themselves, “I hope I’m never faced with that decision, and if I am, I hope I have the moral strength to do what that man did”—because few would. I don’t know if I would.

But that movie will never be made.

When I compare real life to Hollywood, I find that in Presumed Innocent, Hollywood has made an open-and-shut case of morality into something a little more cloudy (surprise, surprise), where “the slut deserved to die because [blah blah blah]”. And the torment of the hero knowing his wife’s guilt, and of his own complicity in not revealing this, somehow makes up for the fact that a woman was killed just because she screwed another woman’s husband. And it’s okay to hide evidence because the prosecution is also doing the same kind of thing. And, and, and… the list of moral excuses runs on and on.

After watching the movie, I cannot tell you how dirty I felt. Because I’d followed the story avidly, seeing morality being bent and twisted this way and that, and all I could think at the end was: No wonder that murderer O.J. Simpson was acquitted.

That’s the pernicious effect of Hollywood, and its insidious effect on our modern culture cannot be underestimated. Wrong is right, provided there are extenuating circumstances, right can be wrong if the other side isn’t being honest on their part, and so on.

At the end of all this, there is no moral compass left on which one can make the proper judgment. The only important thing is winning in the short term, regardless of what harm comes from so doing.

It’s not just in the movies.

I watch people playing sport, and bending the rules to their utmost extent to try to gain a little advantage. I see little honor in sport nowadays: if I were playing Wimbledon, and the linesman made a call against my opponent which was clearly wrong, I would either tank the next point in protest, or I would complain to the umpire and insist on the call being reversed—warning that if not, I would tank the next point in protest.

But that never happens, and these so-called “sportsmen” go on and win huge sums of money, sometimes based on the certain knowledge that they won because of a wrong decision. How do they sleep? I’m not interested in saying that “it happened to him today, it could happen to me tomorrow” and using the law of averages to excuse a wrongful action. I’m not interested in excusing such behavior because great sums of money are involved, either. That’s like excusing a shoplifter because he only stole “a little” money.

Because not correcting an obvious mistake, and profiting thereby, is as wrong as committing an unnoticed foul and going on to win in consequence.

People ask me why I watch golf. You know why? Because golfers call fouls on themselves, even if they may be disqualified from the competition thereby. Golf may be the last true sport left in the world, because people still play the game with scrupulous honesty.

I’m not setting myself up as some paragon of virtue, and that’s not the point of all this.

But in the so-called “bad old days”, Hollywood movies were supposed to show that crime doesn’t pay—even if there are extenuating circumstances. In High Sierra, Humphrey Bogart dies for his crimes, even though his downfall was caused by his feelings for a crippled girl. In modern-day Hollywood, that would be sufficient to secure his escape, and with all the money he’d robbed from a bank into the bargain.

We all chuckle at those old-fashioned rules, where wrongdoing had to show its consequences, and sneer about “censorship” and censors inflicting their “morality” on others.

Let me tell you something.

When the history of this era comes to be written, and people wonder how a society which had become so prosperous, so healthy and so settled, could have sunk into such depths of depravity that the Menendez brothers weren’t executed for cold-bloodedly shotgunning their own parents to death, all the evidence will be found in novels and movies like Presumed Innocent.

 

Western Civilization

Africa, Culture, Ethics, Gummint, Politics

Here’s a map which ranks the various countries of the world from light to dark, from least corrupt to, well, Somalia.

Pop quiz:   Of the lighter-colored (i.e. least corrupt) countries, find the common thread.  (Hint:  it’s in the title of this post.)

For those who are surprised at the relatively-low ranking of the United States among the civilized nations, I would suggest that we would rocket upwards with the conviction of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the dissolution of the Clinton Foundation and the imprisonment of all its officers.  To reach the top of the charts, we’d have to convict all members of Congress (active and/or retired) who became millionaires whilst earning only a Congressional salary.

And by “conviction”, of course, I mean this:

Snowflake Warnings

Culture, Entertainment

One of my most treasured memories is watching the late Frank Zappa tearing into that foul scold Tipper Gore during Congressional hearings.  Gore, you may remember, thought that rock music lyrics were eeeevil and caused kids to become mass murderers or Satanists or something, and Zappa just took her precious little thesis and trashed it with a wonderful mixture of scorn, opprobrium and educated analysis of her silly, nonsensical fears and creeping Puritanism.

I was taken back to those good times when reading this piece of utter bullshit:

Old favorites, outdated attitudes: Can entertainment expire?

They exist throughout society’s pop-culture canon, from movies to TV to music and beyond:  pieces of work that have withstood time’s passage but that contain actions, words and depictions about race, gender and sexual orientation that we now find questionable at best.
Whether it’s blackface minstrel routines from Bing Crosby’s “Holiday Inn,” Apu’s accent in “The Simpsons,” bullying scenes in “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the arguably rapey coercion of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” and “Sixteen Candles” or the simplistically clunky gender interactions of “Mr. Mom,” Americans have amassed a catalog of entertainment across the decades that now raises a series of contentious but never-more-relevant questions:
What, exactly, do we do with this stuff today? Do we simply discard it? Give it a free pass as the product of a less-enlightened age? Or is there some way to both acknowledge its value yet still view it with a more critical eye?

I have a better idea.  Treat it all as entertainment.  And in the manner of Tipper Gore and her ilk, feel free to pepper the covers with all sorts of “parental advisories” or better still, my favorite all-purpose warning that one’s childish sensibilities may be offended by the contents thereof (number to increase with the frightfulness of the content):

  

At least a “10-” warning will announce that I’m about to really enjoy myself.

But for the love of Jupiter’s throbbing headache, leave the classics alone for us grownups to enjoy for the fabulous bits of entertainment they are.   Frankly, there’s absolutely fuck-all about the classics which should frighten anyone, whether it’s Mark Twain using the word “nigger” so freely in Huckleberry Finn  (which novel, lest we forget, did more to change attitudes about race than a dozen Jesse Jacksons) or Gary Cooper taking Claudette Colbert in hand in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938):

At the end of the brilliant movie Thank You For Smoking (2006), there’s a scene where the foul Senator protagonist talks about going back into all the classic movies and digitally removing all traces of smoking, thereby “improving” them.  The man’s unctuous smugness coupled with his utter conviction is so creepy it makes your skin crawl.

And that’s what these pricks are talking about now.  And make no mistake, there’s absolutely no end to it.  If a treasured classic like Baby, It’s Cold Outside can be interpreted to containing “rapey coercion”, then let me assure you all of one thing: nothing is safe.

I have a simple solution to this nonsense:  every time some asshole indulges in some censorship dream like the above, the nearest person should horsewhip them.  Literally.  They get “triggered” by the suggestion of stalking in The Police’s Every Breath You Take ?  Well, I get triggered by their wanting to change the whole fucking world to accommodate their tender sensibilities.

Just remember:  this wonderful, sexy scene in Tom Jones is one day going to disappear forever because some fucking vegan got triggered.

I am getting so sick of people trying to tell me what I should or should not do, or what I may or may not eat, or what entertainment I may or may not enjoy, that there may well come a time when you’ll read about some snowflake getting flogged for trying to bowdlerize the lyrics of Run For Your Life.

And the flogger’s name will be mine.  Which reminds me:  I need to oil the old sjambok, just in case.

As I Said

Culture, Two-Minute Hate

Longtime Readers will know of my loathing for modernist architecture — the squared-off, ugly and unfriendly style which resembles nothing as much as large cubes of concrete stacked on top of each other.  Specifically, my ire has been directed towards the brutalist works of Swiss designer Le Corbusier who, if there is any justice in the world, is spending eternity revolving slowly on a spit in a room where the temperature has been set to “Broil”.

But lest anyone think I’m just being petulant about this asshole, allow me to point you to an older article by Theodore Dalrymple, who lays out Le Corbusier’s works and his philosophy about society.  Here’s an excerpt:

I spoke of the horrors of Le Corbusier’s favorite material, reinforced concrete, which does not age gracefully but instead crumbles, stains, and decays. A single one of his buildings, or one inspired by him, could ruin the harmony of an entire townscape, I insisted. A Corbusian building is incompatible with anything except itself.

And:

Le Corbusier wanted architecture to be the same the world over because he believed that there was a “correct” way to build and that only he knew what it was.
…
A terminal inhumanity—what one might almost call “ahumanity”—characterizes Le Corbusier’s thought and writing, notwithstanding his declarations of fraternity with mankind. This manifests itself in several ways, including in his thousands of architectural photos and drawings, in which it is rare indeed that a human figure ever appears, and then always as a kind of distant ant, unfortunately spoiling an otherwise immaculate, Platonic townscape. Thanks to his high-rise buildings, Le Corbusier says, 95 percent of the city surface shall become parkland—and he then shows a picture of a wooded park without a single human figure present. Presumably, the humans will be where they should be, out of sight and out of mind (the architect’s mind, anyway), in their machines for living in (as he so charmingly termed houses), sitting on machines for sitting on (as he defined chairs).
This ahumanity explains Le Corbusier’s often-expressed hatred of streets and love of roads. Roads were impressive thoroughfares for rushing along at the highest possible speed (he had an obsession with fast cars and airplanes), which therefore had a defined purpose and gave rise to no disorderly human interactions. The street, by contrast, was unpredictable, incalculable, and deeply social. Le Corbusier wanted to be to the city what pasteurization is to cheese.

The only possible reaction to this monstrous philosophy should be horror.  That is hasn’t been, and instead has fostered a long line of copycat architects and town planners, is the reason Le Corbusier should be roasting.

Earlier on, Dalrymple compares Le Corbusier to Lenin in his malevolence towards humanity in general;  I would say that while Lenin killed more actual people, Le Corbusier has  destroyed the souls of more cities and the spirits of the people who live and work in them.

It says much about UNESCO that seventeen of his buildings have been designated World Heritage Sites by that foul organization.  Here’s one, by way of illustration:

Pass me the dynamite, Sheldon.

And speaking of dynamite, I should save a little for the Huffington Post  if for no other reason than because of their breathless lionization of this monster.  Not that anyone should ever read anything in HuffPo, but should you want to see more architectural monstrosities, said article contains lots of examples of his work, all of which should make you recoil in horror.  I couldn’t bear to publish more than one;  they’re not so discriminating, the poxy little Marxists.  Huffpo marvels at Le Corbusier’s influence on the modern world;  so do I, but I regard it more in the same perspective as that of the Black Plague on the medieval period.

Hidden Depths

Culture, Men & Women

Like many of my contemporaries — people who grew up in a British colony — my childhood literary upbringing was primarily that of the Mother Country:  Rudyard Kipling, Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, C.S. Lewis and so on.

Another was a female author, E. (Edith) Nesbit, who wrote Victorian-era children’s classics such as The Railway Children and The Story Of The Treasure-Seekers.  As a child, I remember my parents reading both to me at bedtime.

One always thinks of the authors of children’s literature — especially female authors — as quiet, spinsterly or even virginal.  In the case of Edith Nesbit, it turns out, nothing could be further from the truth.

So far, Edith had been rather a passive participant in ‘free love’, but she now began to even the score with Hubert, embarking on a series of romantic affairs with young writers whom she mentored. Some of these relationships may have been platonic rather than passionate, such as her fling with George Bernard Shaw, who she met through the Fabian Society.
…
It’s likely her other lovers were less reserved.  The young poet Richard Le Gallienne was captivated by Edith’s beauty and unconventional style – she refused to wear a corset and cut her hair boyishly short, drifting around in flowing robes, her wrists jangling with bangles – and she contemplated leaving Hubert for him.
A young accountant, Noel Griffith, was the next to be dazzled by her, although he found her ménage à trois with Alice and Hubert bizarre, observing that Alice seemed uncomfortable and that Edith found Alice irritating.  The only real beneficiary was Hubert, who was ‘very hot-blooded’ and ‘abnormally sexual’ – which didn’t stop him moralising about the importance of fidelity in his newspaper columns.  Meanwhile, Edith let her children run wild, playing on the railway, and turned a blind eye to domestic chaos.

Sounds positively 21st-century, dunnit?