Epigram

After Dorothy Parker and Dunhill Lights

A cigarette if you don't mind; yours be the hand to lend it

And grant me this my one request, to save my life and end it.

A Post That Will Not Be Funny at All Unless You Know How to, and Do in Fact Read

Was amusing myself with my brother by mixing and matching the titles of famous works of literature. Here are some of the results. Warning: the only thing more irritating than a nerd is a nerd who is also a pompous ass.

1) The Divine Comedy of Errors

2) Fathers and Sons and Lovers

3) The Portrait of Dorian Gray as a Young Man

4) Huckleberry Finnegan's Wake

5) Of Mice and Human Bondage

6) The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Nothingness

7) The Death of Ivan Ilych, a Salesman

8) The Screwtape Letters to a Young Poet

9) Bleak House of Mirth

10) A Farewell to Arms and the Man

11) This Side of Paradise Lost

12) The Sentimental Education of Henry Adams

13) Women in Love in the Time of Cholera

14) Lie Down in Darkness at Noon

15) House Full of Don Quixote

16) The Decline and Fall of the House of Usher

17) The Telltale Heart of Darkness

18) The Light in August That Failed

19) Fear and Trembling in Las Vegas

20) The Last Tycoon of the Mohicans

Some Relatively Unfavorable Commentary on the Recent Death of Jerry Falwell

I am not aware that any of the criticism, deserved or otherwise, that attatched itself to Jerry Falwell over the length of his career ever took note of the fundamental (no pun intended) contradiction that was at the heart of his favorite line of rhetoric. Falwell's critics invariably took aim at his deliberate and frequent divisiveness and at the lack of both taste and humanity denoted by his comments. Often, his critics were correct in so doing-certainly his suggestion that gay and lesbian couples were the sole parties that ought to be taken to account for the September Eleventh Attacks would have been best left unsaid-but they have been strangely silent on the chief paradox of his ideological platform, namely, that he wished to both act as the chosen arbiter in dealing with a social ill and appear as one of its chief victims.

Falwell was the founder of the notorious "Moral Majority," one of the less disputable proofs that what is good for Republicanism in America is not likewise healthy for Christianity in the same. Falwell credited this organization for the elections of both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and didn't much exaggerate in his claim; his organization raised 70 million dollars for Reagan alone in his first run for the presidency, and has played a significant hand in subsequent Republican bids for office. Falwell set himself up as the spiritual voice of the political party which unquestionably dominated political discourse in the 80's and enjoyed an almost uninterrupted hegemony on capitol hill between 1994 and November of last year.

In spite of the political influence he enjoyed and didn't mind mentioning (he commented once that it was due to his brainchild that America was not in worse spiritual straits than was the case) Falwell also liked to play the proverbial Victim Card when it suited his motives. The picture of America he often painted was one in which Christians (or TheoCons, which in the terms he selected usually came across as the same thing) were gaurding the keep of Christ's Kingdom on Earth while under assault from all sides by a variety of infidels, ranging from illegal immegrants to commentators in the employ of National Public Radio. The advantage derived from this grotesque framing of Christians' place on the political stage of America is that the religious right now feels the paradoxical impulses of a robust and virile demographical voice that has elected three of the last four presidents, and a reactive and self righteous paranoia that ensures that every housewife in Topeka now feels every bit as disenfranchised (and is certainly every bit as vocal) as her enlightened feminist counterpart in Manhattan.

It's certainly not a misrepresentation of most liberals of the post Vietnam era to say that they illegitimately made all victims to appear as martyrs and all the oppressed as angels. This development, I believe, is nothing short of secularized baptism, a baptism in which instead of Man's redemption by Christ's Blood from sin unto righteousness he is redeemed by his own suffering, and uplifted from voicelesness and disenfranchisement and granted a seat at the Table of Righteousness, or excuse me, Special Interest Dialogue. God had His chosen people before Christ died for all, and provided that all might be given membership in His Body, and democracy does more or less the same thing, only by means of extending the vote to those who have not got it and playing upon the bitterness Man feels toward the empowered above him. Thus they "Behold the Man" as did the Jews at Pilate's order, but The Man in question is a white republican who has no other name.

Falwell's greatest legacy was helping to introduce the culture of victimhood to the church in America, and the particular baptism that attends it. With this he also introduced the need for American Christians to choose between yet another counterfeit Christendom and the one that whose provision was made on Calvary two thousand years ago.

May he Rest in Peace.

More Movie Props

Seraphim Falls establishes itself as a solid entry in the naturalistic, Cormac McCarthyesque, quasi-mythopoetic genre of films (if that is in fact a genre) that also includes The Proposition and a few other revisionist westerns. If you're into that sort of thing, its worth three bucks and an empty afternoon. Recommended that you have a Ryan Adams record playing distractingly in the background to complete the experience.

Some Forster

Here is a passage from E.M. Forster's essay "Art for Art's Sake" which I found very enjoyable.

"In the world of daily life, the world which we perforce inhabit, there is much talk about order, particularly from statesmen and politicians. They tend, however, to confuse order with orders, just as they confuse creation with regulations. Order, I suggest, is something evolved from within, not something imposed from without; it is an internal stability, a vital harmony, and, in the social and political category, it has never existed except for the convenience of historians. Viewed realistically, the past is really a series of disorders, succeeding one another by discoverable laws, no doubt, and certainly marked by an increasing growth of human interference, but disorders all the same. So that, speaking as a writer, what I hope for today is for disorder which will be more favorable to artists than is the present one, and which will provide them with fuller inspirations and better material conditions. It will not last-nothing lasts-but there have been some advantageous disorders in the past-for instance in ancient Athens, in Renaissance Italy, eighteenth-century France, periods in China and Persia-and we may do something to accelerate the next one. But let us not again fix our hearts where true joys are not to be found. We were promised a new order after the First World War through the League of Nations. It did not come, nor have I faith in present promises, by whomsoever endorsed. The implacable offensive of Science forbids. We cannot reach social and political stability for the reason that we continue to make scientific discoveries and to apply them, and thus to destroy the arrangements which were based on more elementary discoveries. If science would discover rather than apply-if, in other words, men were more interested in knowledge than in power-mankind would be in a far safer position, the stability statesmen talk about would be a possibility, there could be a new order based on vital harmony, and the earthly millenium might approach. But Science shows no sign of doing this: she gave us the internal combustion engine, and before we had digested and assimilated it with terrible pains into our social system, she harnessed the atom, and destroyed any new order that seemed to be evolving. How can man get into harmony with his surroundings when he is constantly altering them? The future of our race is, in this direction, more unpleasant than we care to admit, and it has sometimes seemed to me that its best chance lies through apathy, uninventiveness, and inertia. Universal exhaustion might promote that Change of Heart which is at present so briskly recommended from a thousand pulpits. Universal exhaustion would certainly be a new experience. The human race has never undergone it, and is still too perky to admit that it may be coming and might result in a sprouting of new growth through the decay."

-1949-

Movie Props

Anyone who has not seen "The Painted Veil" needs to do so. Now. Edward Norton and Naomi Watts both give the performances of their careers. Also it is the most beautifully photographed film of All Time.

The Philosophy of Guilt

One of the sticks most widely preferred for beating the Left Wing into submission is the accusation of a "Guilt Complex." "White Guilt," "Bleeding Heart" and other descriptives of like substance are conferred almost exclusively on the liberal contingent of the sociopolitical spectrum, generally in reference to said contingent's disapproval of any conservative policy that has ever caused suffering in some isolated instance in the Third World. There is an implicit assumption attending the resentment of the Guilt Complex that the liberals' protestations of shame for their country's "Mismanagement of Global Affairs" is an attitude divorced from any tradition in the main of American ethical behavior, and therefore only one of the many Freaks that the culture of the lobbyist has offered us. Consequently, the rallying cry of the Right becomes "This is America, (preferably pronounced Amuhrica) and we don't need no smart-assed libruhl faggits tellin' us how to feel guilty 'bout profilin' or Dar Four or nuthin!" For a more completely, and no doubt, cogently devised exposition of this same worldview, try referencing the Toby Keith songbook or conversing with some of Fox News' more adamant focus groups.

Editorials aside, I find myself strangely unoffended by the nationalist elitism apparent in the above statement, hesitant as I am to align myself with any kind of flag waving, especially since the most patriotic of this set usually wants to set the Stars and Bars alongside the Stars and Stripes. In spite of this, I think the sentiment is a not invalid one. Unfortunately, it misunderstands the thing it reacts to.


The liberal guilt in question is not a thing that has developed in a vacuum or even originated in the offices of the New York Times (proud as they might be to claim the contrary) but traces its ancestry at least to a much earlier point in American history. Quite frankly, the immediate descendants of the puritans had a guilt complex to rival that of any of our "Cheese eating surrender monkeys,"* and were able to find quite the audience for it. Our morbid historical fascination with guilt found its literary originators in Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe.
Hawthorne reveled in it noticeably more than Poe, a fact to which "The Scarlet Letter" and "The House of the Seven Gables" bear testimony. Poe's attitude towards personal guilt is more amoral than anything, and reveals him to be more the literary heir of Walpole or Byron than anyone on our side of the Atlantic. And this is one of the fundamental differences between British character and American: At no time in our history have we been particularly willing to forgive our own past, while their excuses for their own reach the level of a fine art. I cannot think of any other nation whose monarchy was built upon myth, whose church was founded by a philanderer and whose empire was premised on piracy that has remained so consistently in love with itself. If America had similar patterns of behavior anywhere on its record, I think that self-flagellation would become a matter of public policy.

None of this, of course, is meant as an apologetic for our infatuation with opening our old wounds and pouring the curious salve of left wing vinegar into them. Whatever else its implications, it does suggest that We on the Right are not such incontestable inheritors of "Traditional Americanism" as we so often flatter ourselves is the case.