It’s a common error to think that mystics and magicians are generally liberals or leftists. At least in America.
Most Boomer Americans, monolingual, insulated from the rest of the world and from history, associate “magick” with hippies, the “60s”, Tim Leary, pot and acid, and sexual freedom. When they think about it at all which isn’t often, these days. Most younger Americans don’t think about it at all, being too busy sexting, face booking and in other ways competing for visible status. Ritual, programmed self-hypnosis and other inner work are less common now, since they don’t yield outward signs of wealth or cool.
At least not right away.
I don’t know as much about Europe directly, but my impression is that there’s bit more attention to these subjects still, especially in Eastern Europe, and across the age groups. But as a rapidly shrinking population of young people plugs in, turns on and tweets out, I suppose the same thing is happening there, too.
In truth, ritual magick, symbolic meditation and related practices have always been the tool of a tiny, cognitive elite, in all societies and across all civilizations. They’re simply too difficult, too esoteric, too scary and too uncertain. And while I jest about status-signaling today, it’s always been important to most people, and occult practices have never brought the kind of status boost that killing the biggest buffalo, having the biggest automobile or (nowadays) being the biggest “victim” did.
Few had the insight into that peculiar experience that is the Black American experience that Gil Scott Heron possessed. He died May 2011 and the social networks were abuzz with people who likely heard none of his music, and if they did, understood little of it. Mr. Scott knew the Blues and understood Jazz, which means he knew what it meant to be Black. His music and life was almost a perfect analogy of post 1960’s Black America.
While Mr. Scott’s and my political differences make it unlikely we were looking at this from the same perspective, it is clear he also saw an intractable decline on the horizon in America especially in Black America. This “Winter” the brother speaks about, in his best song Winter in America, features us gunning each other down, seemingly without pause. I won’t give into media sensationalism and ignore the improvement in the Black murder rate in the last twenty years, but our rate of committing homicidal acts toward one another is still dizzying relative to other ethnicities and our 1950s selves.
We have assimilated into materialistic mainstream culture at a dizzying rates. Our “intellectuals” have certainly failed to live up to Harold Cruse’s ideal that dictated:
“The special function of the Negro intellectual is a cultural one. He should take to the rostrum and assail the stultifying blight of the commercially depraved white middle-class who has poisoned the structural roots of the American people into a nation of intellectual dolts… He should tell black America how and why Negroes are trapped in this cultural degeneracy, and how it has dehumanized their essential identity, squeezed the lifeblood of their inherited cultural ingredients out of them, and then relegated them to the cultural slums.”
Instead our intellectuals have done nothing more than use the suffering of our poorest as a guilt trip to leverage against whites and get themselves accepted into white institutions. With few exceptions they merely repeat and slightly refashion the jargon handed down to them by old tired Marxists and other white liberals. They rarely offer anything in the way cultural rebirth or self determination.
As a tribe we have forgot all the traditions that sustained us during that long walk from chattel to “freedom.” Our sense of community is long gone in most places, our dedication to the institutions founded by our ancestors nil. We tend not to even get married, we have almost all of our kids out-of-wedlock, our dedication to our own families is even circumspect. Since “official” integration (where the middle class blacks chased white people where ever they went) it seems the only thing we have gained was a marginal amount of wealth, although our wealth in relation to whites remains stagnant. Yet we are happy that we are integrated. I suppose living next to white folk and being allowed into their institutions made all these declines and the impending death of our culture and institutions worthwhile to most. Hey, at least we can feel self-important for embracing diversity.
Undoubtedly those of us who actually care about Black communities, which are way different from “the Black Community,” see these issues for what they are, dismal signs of a dying people and decaying culture. Can we be saved? I have no idea. But as Gil said in Winter in America“sister (and brother) save your soul” if you can’t save anything else.
Fittingly the great Gil Scott Heron died, May 27, 2011 (62), in the dying former capital of Negro culture and self-determination Harlem, NY. I think the griot was telling us something.
From the Indians who welcomed the pilgrims
And to the buffalo who once ruled the plains
Like the vultures circling beneath the dark clouds
Looking for the rain
Looking for the rain
Just like the cities staggered on the coastline
Living in a nation that just can’t stand much more
Like the forest buried beneath the highway
Never had a chance to grow
Never had a chance to grow
And now it’s winter
Winter in America
Yes and all of the healers have been killed
Or sent away, yeah
But the people know, the people know
It’s winter
Winter in America
And ain’t nobody fighting
‘Cause nobody knows what to save
Save your soul, Lord knows
From Winter in America
The Constitution
A noble piece of paper
With free society
Struggled but it died in vain
And now Democracy is ragtime on the corner
Hoping for some rain
Looks like it’s hoping
Hoping for some rain
And I see the robins
Perched in barren treetops
Watching last-ditch racists marching across the floor
But just like the peace sign that vanished in our dreams
Never had a chance to grow
Never had a chance to grow
And now it’s winter
It’s winter in America
And all of the healers have been killed
Or betrayed
Yeah, but the people know, people know
It’s winter, Lord knows
It’s winter in America
And ain’t nobody fighting
Cause nobody knows what to save
Save your souls
From Winter in America
And now it’s winter
Winter in America
And all of the healers done been killed or sent away
Yeah, and the people know, people know
It’s winter
Winter in America
And ain’t nobody fighting
Cause nobody knows what to save
And ain’t nobody fighting
Cause nobody knows, nobody knows
And ain’t nobody fighting
Here’s the whole event, videotaped for your convenience by the Freda Utley Foundation:
Here’s a link to the text for my bit. I’ll collect other transcripts here if they are posted online. Go like the book on Facebook too, and if you’re in the Midwest, check out his speaking dates out your way in the next week.
The text of my talk last night at the National Press Club is now online over on the Porch, here’s some of it:
Greetings. As the token conservative on the panel, I intend to get to what the Socialist Party has to say to us, but I’d like to begin, true to form, by complaining about the liberal media.
In September of last year, the New Republic released a 100th anniversary anthology with a more insurgent title than the magazine has ever earned, called “Insurrections of the Mind,” curated by their recently deposed editor Franklin Foer. In it he offers a succinct summation of what one might call Crolyism for the 21st Century: “the marriage of welfare statism and civil liberties is essentially the definition of American liberalism.”
In the Baffler this month, the estimable left-wing writer George Scialabba corrected him, noting the marriage in question “has actually been a love triangle,” with interventionist foreign policy as the third leg.
As the New Republic and its counterpart the Nation go through their anniversary retrospections, one in its 101st year and the other in its 150th, both have published long essays taking stock of their past. In the New Republic’s case, we might have hoped for a critical reevaluation of its mostly unbroken century of interventionism, before both World Wars right up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Instead, what we have is an extended mea culpa of a cover story about the magazine’s support for welfare reform and its failure to hire a diverse enough staff. Whatever the merits of this newfound sensitivity, to focus on that to the exclusion of the magazine’s militarism seems like a cop-out. In 2015, to diversify a magazine will earn you plaudits from all corners of respectable society. To question war and empire, on the other hand, usually means sacrificing one’s reputation.
Read the rest here. Photo above courtesy JD Gordon
The Daily Caller’s Eric Owens has an interesting piece up on a bizarre section in Barron’s AP European History (a study guide aimed at preparing high school students for the Advanced Placement European History exam – a test that could earn them college course credit). The guide provides a chart that details the political factions and ideologies behind the French Revolution – Owens ran with the bizarre conflation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the Ku Klux Klan as the “Reactionary/Fascist” forces (more on the use of “fascism” later). As outrageous as that is – and it is definitely outrageous – the real lede is buried completely. If you look at the chart, it gets pretty much nothing right.
Let’s begin from left to right on their “Political Spectrum.” The sans-culottes are placed somewhat reasonably – though the chart misspells the term as “Sams Culottes,” like a Sam’s Club but for pants only). Here, though, it would also be appropriate to note that the sans-culottes were less of a mob and more along the lines of a motley group of radicalized laborers who became militant partisans during the Revolution. They weren’t so much “Communist” as they were radical democrats and republicans spurred on by anarchist factions like the Enragés and anti-Christian/terrorist factions like the Hébertists. The inclusion of the Enragés and Hébertists would have given some perspective into the radical nature of the far-left drive of the revolution.
As you begin to move to right from the sans-culottes, the chart becomes a mess of inaccuracy. The Montagnards weren’t just some “leftist” group that wanted to “regulate banks and corporations.” Led by Maximilien Robespierre, the Montagnards held down the far left of the Legislative Assembly. Their political rivals – only slightly to their right in terms of ideology – were the Girondists (not the Girendists as Barron’s spells it). The Girondists, as with the Montagnards, were anti-monarchy. The key difference between the two factions, however was over the general course of the revolution. The Girondists were killed in mass executions during the Reign of Terror in which the radical-Jacobin Montagnards and Hébertists hunted down and murdered their political rivals. The Barron’s chart bizarrely insinuates that the Jacobins were anywhere from leftist to moderate/centrist – a laughable designation when you take into consideration that the chart has the Girondists to the right of the Feuillants.
The Feuillants were a faction in the Legislative Assembly who broke with the more left-wing Jacobins over what form of government France would take. While the radical Jacobins wished for a republican or democratic form of government, the Feuillants pushed for a constitutional monarchy – rejecting the more radical Jacobin propositions. As mentioned above, the ideological beliefs of the Feuillants should see them placed to the right of the Girondists as the Feuillants were far more “conservative.”
Once more
My quondam dean in University Hall
Stands in the breach of peace, whence he will call
Down fire on the bald, woolly heads of all
Professors of the other point of view,
Who, flanked and enfiladed and too few,
Will soon throw down their dated arms of course,
And yield themselves to a superior force
Of well-drilled intellectual police,
Sworn on honor to enforce the peace.
— L.E. Sissman, “Peace Comes to Still River, Mass.”
I got in trouble on Twitter the other day, for quoting a post by Henry Dampier. Jesse Spafford, a writer who has contributed to the flagship magazine of Brooklyn leftism, the New Inquiry, says I shared “an essay lamenting that the Nazis lost WWII.” Readers can decide whether the following passage “laments” that:
Imagining that the Nazis won World War II is a popular jumping-off point for a lot of speculative fiction. The reader is supposed to feel glad that the Nazis did not in fact, win. Unfortunately, a more brutal, cruel, and anti-human government won World War II — the Soviet Union.
This is a heterodox version of the story, maybe, but not that controversial, and certainly not the exclusive domain of Nazi apologists.’Yalta could have gone better’ is a fairly well-accepted point of view. That Dampier quote is straight out of Pat Buchanan, though by no means confined to the populist corner of the right. Or even just the right. The independent left Tribune, of which George Orwell was literary editor, objected to the Yalta agreement. And here’s Dwight MacDonald in the 1952 debate with Norman Mailer at Mount Holyoke:
… the only historically real alternatives in 1939 were to back Hitler’s armies, to back the Allies’ armies, or to do nothing. But none of these alternatives promised any great benefit for mankind, and the one that finally triumphed has led simply to the replacing of the Nazi threat by the Communist threat, with the whole ghastly newsreel flickering through once more in a second showing.
Who knew MacDonald was a Nazi apologist? I’m sympathetic to Christopher Lasch’s criticism of him famously, and grudgingly, “choosing” the West, which he lodges in The New Radicalism in America, that “to “choose” between the two, however, was to assume that conflict between Russia and the West could not be avoided. If one assumed such a conflict, one had to choose — as most people had felt obliged to choose between Hitler and the West.”
At this point, I suppose it’s worth noting that by the standards of the anti-colonial style that dominates the left today, to “choose” the West at all is to side with a kind of fascism. You’d have to ask Spafford about that one, but it is at least clear that, to our Pomona philosophy graduate, it is impossible to think both that Nazis are bad and the post-World War II peace conceded far too much to the Soviet Union; the only person who could possibly think that is a Nazi apologist. It went onlikethis for a while before I blocked him and he tweeted about it.
I’d go so far as to say there’s one thing about about all of this that resembles the way the Stalinist left in America behaved after Operation Barbarossa, insinuating pacifists and Trotskyites were on Hitler’s payroll. In his tweet, Spafford cc’d Michael Goldfarb, the registered foreign agent and chairman of the Free Beacon, a neoconservative website that publishes unverified, fake propaganda from Senate offices intended to gin up the case for war in Ukraine. Spafford, a committed leftist, is not only aping Debbie Wasserman Schultz, but making common cause with neoconservatives to do so. This is interesting not just because the Free Beacon is staunchly pro-Israel (Spafford thinks Israel is fascist too). It also speaks to the idea that the neoconservative and left-wing narratives about World War II are roughly the same.
