Over at Chronicles, Clyde Wilson wrote a piece about things he missed from the past. There’s a fairly long thread with reader’s additions to the list of things, and it’s good to look back now and again.

In the spirit of that piece, I will add a few things I remember — and miss — from my early life.

Sleeping on the screened-in porch in the hot summer. It seems there was no concern about security or safety then, and we never heard of trespassers or burglars in our neighborhood.

The milkman, and the fruit-and-vegetable man who drove a horse-drawn wagon through the streets, calling out ”cantyloupes, cantyloupes, watermelons, home-grown tomaters…’ Of course the best watermelons were the ones given to us by cousin Zack, from his patch. My grandmother, when she gave us children watermelon, simply gave us all spoons and half a watermelon, and let us dig in, out in the back yard. We loved doing that.

There was also the bread man, who delivered not only bread but sweet rolls and other baked goods to our door. You paid him at the end of the month, as with the milk man.

Actually, though, for quite a while we got all our milk from my aunt’s husband, who brought us a gallon of raw milk from his cows every day.

Dr. Wilson mentions getting a soft drink from the ‘cold water of an old-fashioned drink box.’ I remember those coolers; at Miss Viola’s store, the bottles always had sort of rust stains on them because of the minerals in the (very hard) water.

Old-fashioned soda fountains, where you got a coke for a nickel. The coke was mixed at the counter, by combining the flavored syrup with the carbonated water, served in a glass, and sipped through a paper straw.

Drive-in hamburger places, with carhops. I realize there are still a few such places left, but not many, seemingly. The hamburgers were made to order, not made up in advance, and left under a heat lamp, as in fast-food places of today. The burgers came wrapped in waxed paper, and in my childhood they cost about 15 cents.

Drive-in movies. They were not just ‘passion pits’ for the teenagers but places where the whole family could go, and enjoy a double feature. Incidentally, do double features (let alone triple features) still exist? Not that movies these days are worth watching, anyway.

Dime stores, where you could buy a little of everything, most of it under a dollar or two in price, and some things actually costing only a dime.

Penny candy. Certain candies, like peanut patties, which seem to have been sold mostly in the South. Also fried pies; people in the North seem not to know what a ‘fried pie’ is.

Dr. Wilson mentions women wearing dresses, a subject we were discussing recently on the ‘old America’ thread. I miss not only the dresses but I would like to see hats make a comeback. When I was a child, to be well-dressed, man or woman, you really needed a hat. Women needed white gloves, and the purse and shoes had to match. I know most people of today think that kind of thing was constricting and oppressive, but it gave life a certain elegance. Special occasions were more special because we put on our best for them.

I remember, too, that the older gentlemen would doff their hats in the presence of a lady. Yes, I know there are not many ladies left these days, in fact lady has become a dirty word with the feminist crowd, but life was more genteel back then, and the word ‘lady’ was a compliment.

The word ‘gentleman’ used to mean something as well; nowadays whenever some police spokesman (I mean spokesperson) is being interviewed for TV news about an arrest, they refer to the perpetrator or the accused as a ”gentleman” –”I saw the gentleman wielding a knife…” how absurd. Criminals are not ”gentlemen”; the word should be reserved for those who merit it.

What memories do you all have of the past, of your childhood?

The comments are interesting, encompassing various topics, including the deteriorating state of female dress since the days of those photographs. I have been talking about this with friends lately; I miss the days of wearing dresses and skirts all the time, but most of us have unthinkingly drifted into wearing more unisex-type clothing – jeans or athletic garb – for casual wear. I’ve lamented the fact that most people seem to dress casually if not shabbily for even more formal or important occasions these days. The excuse is usually that ”I like to be comfortable; comfort comes first.”
Granted, I like comfortable clothes, too, but surely it’s possible to dress attractively while not sacrificing comfort; dressing nicely does not imply discomfort.

I happen to believe that people took themselves more seriously, had more dignity, and were more ‘grown-up’ in those days when people dressed like adults. It’s particularly pathetic, I think, to see senior citizens, bent with age, shuffling along in sweatsuits or jeans and athletic shoes. It’s somehow demeaning, to my way of thinking.

Clothes may not make the man, but I think they do have an effect on our self-perception and on the way we carry ourselves and comport ourselves. And of course other people do, many times, judge us by the care with which we dress and groom ourselves.

I also notice in those photos the softer appearance of many of the young women; there was less hardness and cynicism in the eyes and faces of the young women than one sees today.

About this time somebody will say ”oh, but the good old days weren’t that good in reality” or ”we can’t turn the clock back’ or some other disparaging comment. No, we can’t turn the clock back but I think we can look at those old images and compare; we can take stock and examine what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost through the course of these last few tumultuous decades. And yes, if we will it, we can reclaim some of the good things from the past. If we will it.

The city pictures are here.

It’s evident in seeing the pictures that many Americans were materially poorer back then, but to me what is most striking is the difference in the people, in their whole demeanor and facial expressions.
I leave it to you to discern what you can about life then vs. life in post-American ‘America’, circa 2010.

Again, thanks to Dr. D for the links.

It will surprise none of you, candid readers, that la divina Sara‘s new memoir Going Rogue: An American Life, with six weeks to go before release date, has already rocketed to number one on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Yes, Governor Palin, that most potent mixture of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Magna Mater and Britomart, to name just a few of her coruscating personae, is a rock star, who leaves bourgeoise hags like Miss Hell Obomber and lumpen lesbians like Hillary Clinton in the dust.  She’s a scintillating ball of energy and blooming good health — in addition to being a blend of William Jennings Bryan and Robert Alphonso Taft, of blessed Old America memory — and she could draw 50,000 people to the opening of a hardware store, on an hour’s notice.

Beat that, Barack Hussein Ogabe, you gangling, crack-smoking pimp.  But then, I guess there are no chapters in Alinsky for dealing with forces of nature.  The affirmative-action incompetent in the White House and his loathsome Chicago handlers are way out of their depth dealing with Palin, as we saw last fall when her mesmerizing speech at the Republican National Convention sent Ogabe’s Potemkin village campaign into a tailspin (rescued, just in the nick of time, by the spectacular collapse of the Federal Reserve’s stock-jobbing house of cards).

Herewith, therefore, a link to SarahPAC, where you can donate a few Yankee dollars to our first female President’s political action committee, as I did this afternoon — yes, my widow’s mite goes to Sarah, and cheerfully done:

http://sarahpac.com/

I trust Gov. Palin will continue to be the focus of support not only for us Constitutionalists, populists, paleoconservatives, libertarians, and values voters, but also for all you Republicans of good will out there who think McCain, Grahamnesty and Lamar Alexander (the last two voted to confirm Red Sonia Sotomayor) and the rest of those country-club Viagravators should get bent.

Grahamnesty : Does the depilated old queen imagine that thin, tight rictus passes for a smile? And that porcine nose, as though he were constantly scenting his own sulphurous fart.  Would that Mencken were living at this day, to satirize this high prole come up in the world, or better yet Catullus, with his Celtiberian nouveaux riches proudly showing their teeth on the slightest pretext, freshly brushed with Spanish piss.

Speaking of country clubs, the principle-free zone that is Mitt “Stop Me if You’ve Heard Me Deny the Divinity of Christ Before” Romney, and the rest of the Grand Old Plutocrats, better be nice to Sarah. Remember the last banker with a personality bypass who crossed us and thought he could still be president? The one defeated by Perot and succeeded by Clinton?

[All emphasis in the following is mine.]

What Happened to Common Sense?
by Mary Ellen Chase, from Coronet Magazine, May, 1954

Whenever I return to the isolated Maine village where I spend every summer, I am pleasantly surprised by the way in which my neighbors there hold on to certain old terms.

One of these is grit, with its companion, gumption; another is get up and get, which in Maine means to depend on oneself; yet another is common sense. These words describe the human qualities which my neighbors, fishermen and their wives, extoll above all others. For fishing is a hard calling. It demands gumption, or in more polite terms, self-reliance, the power of decision and the determination not to be downed by adverse circumstances.

My neighbors are frankly suspicious of anyone who lacks these old American virtues. They voiced their common judgment of a man who had lost his lobster traps in a northeast gale and had been bewailing his fate with too little reserve.

“Why don’t he shut his mouth and pick up his feet?” they said, “You can’t set sail straight by takin’ time to bawl about bad luck.”

They and I stem from the same rural background. In the country school of my childhood, precepts were written on the blackboard, each Monday morning by our “old-fashioned” teachers who knew it to be their duty to instill iron in our souls as well as common fractions in our minds. Through the years those precepts have proved salutary to me in moments of indecision and anxiety. Usually they were in terse prose:

“It takes a live fish to swim upstream, but any old log can float down.”
Don’t expect others to bear your troubles; they have their own.
Life isn’t all you want, but it’s all you have; so have it.”

Occasionally a rhyme enlivened us. One I recall as a favorite.

The mind of man has no defense
To equal plain, old common sense.
This homely virtue don’t despise,
If you would be happy as well as wise.

Parents, too, 50 years ago dealt out such robust aphorisms liberally, sometimes even sternly, in the upbringing of children. I was taught early by both precept and example that a job once undertaken has to be completed whatever the cost, and that no one but the maker of them ought to be expected to pay for mistakes.

[...]During my life as a teacher I have often questioned whether we have discovered any worthy substitutes for those precepts and teachings which, outmoded as they seem, are rooted deeply in our history and our ways of life.

In place of the old sayings we use today new words and terms to describe our states of mind and our meetings of those difficulties and questions which will always beset us. We are now insecure, or ill-adjusted, or frustrated, or made ineffective by a sense of inferiority. These new words lack the optimism of the old. Implicit in them is the notion that we are surrounded by foes difficult to defeat.

The new vocabulary comes into use early. We hesitate to look upon our children as simply ill-mannered or spoiled. We fear that they are problem children who need expert care lest they become neurotics or uncontributive members of society.

In high school and college they are surrounded by advisers on what they would best study, what work in life they are best fitted for. They are too seldom encouraged to face problems by themselves, to make their own decisions and to pay the consequences of their own mistakes.

Nor are adults free from waves of anxiety. Too many of us are looking about for some panacea which will ease the burdens of our past and present errors in judgment and lighten our fears of the future. Something, we feel, is wrong somewhere, and without making any stout attempts on our own to discover what it is, we turn to professional advice which guarantees to show us how to understand ourselves.

Even a cursory reading of such books reveals nothing but what we used to call plain old common sense. They urge upon us a calm and objective weighing of ourselves; a frank and even merciless recognition of our weaknesses and failures, a determination to oust at any cost oversensitiveness, which is but a form of self-indulgence; a sense of personal responsibility for the well-being of our families and communities; a fresh start; in short, reliance on our own powers of self-discipline.

No one in his senses would suggest that such books are not often helpful to the anxious mind. But the assumption that most of us have somehow acquired emotional conflicts which we cannot cope with by ourselves surely has its dangers.

We Americans have since our beginnings been known for our self-reliance, for our gumption and common sense. We are, or at least we were, adventurers and our history is the story of a game played against tremendous odds and gloriously won. Why not recall the tough moral fiber which made the winning possible? Isn’t it about time that we return as individuals to those values and practices which we have not forgotten so much as neglected?

[...]Life may not be all we want, but it’s all we have, as my old school precept said, and it’s high time that we have it. We shall not find its secrets or its possible riches in the advice of others, however wise, unless we complete that counsel with our own grit, gumption, and common sense.”

This is interesting. Obviously Blair sees the leftist, multicult globalists as being the exemplars of ‘moderate, benign values’, which is laugh-out-loud funny when taken in light of the events of today. All leftists and liberals have the delusion that they are the benign ones, the uniters and healers, the good guys, and our side is the ‘haters’ and the ”intolerant fundamentalists” when in fact they are the ultimate forces of intolerance.

(Note to self: turn leftists’ terms of abuse back on them. They are to be called ‘intolerant‘ and fundamentalist.)

Nevertheless, in keeping with the old adage that even a broken clock is right twice a day, Blair was correct that what is needed in the struggle which is something to inspire people. The term ‘a set of values’ is not a very inspiring phrase, to me, and a better way of putting it might be Michael O’Meara’s ‘the power of myth‘, the role of myth in inspiring and regenerating a people, or forging a sense of nationhood and national purpose and destiny.

I agree to that extent; one can only go so far in diagnosing our ailments as a people and examining the etiology of those maladies. Something inspiring, something unifying, something transcendent has to energize any successful restoration.

”The people as a mass lack any interest in what they see as the unreal, impractical, and often inaccessible realm of ideas.

Whenever they enter the historical arena under the banner of the great social and nationalist movements, they are, for this reason, moved not by ideas, not even by self-interest, but by something else entirely — which has to do with (let’s call it) the mythic core of metapolitics.

Before getting to this, let me just quickly finish what I started to say about The Occidental Quarterly. The writers, activists, and sponsors who support its metapolitical project are not merely interested in understanding and interpreting the inverted world that seeks the destruction of their kind. They would also like to change this world.

The Quarterly’s metapolitical project aims, thus, at putting in motion a movement — in thought, to start — that will lead to the eventual founding of a white ethnostate and, with it, a restoration of the white man’s rightful place in the world — and I don’t mean this in any Hollywood Nazi sense, but rather in terms of a people’s national right to retain the ownership and control of their own lands.”
[...]
Reason, self-interest, and other such factors may, of course, motivate reform and self-improvement and every social system depends on them, but these factors never propel men into battle at the risk of life and limb, they never cause a people to go beyond the bounds of reasonable considerations, to shun their narrow egoism, and to take risks that challenge the prevailing state of things.

Something more primordial is always at work whenever the masses enter the historical arena.

For Sorel, a people assumes a historical role only when they are seized by an enthralling myth, whose symbols embody both their conscious and unconscious worldview and accords with their moral and ethical judgments about what’s fair or just. Myth, as such, forms communities of like-minded people and thus a sense of solidarity, just as the heroic sensibility it fosters makes possible the social and moral renewal that’s part of every revolutionary transformation.

“As long as there are no myths accepted by the masses,” Sorel writes, “one may go on talking of revolt indefinitely, without provoking any revolutionary movement.”

In Sorel’s view, myth is that “body of images which, by intuition alone,” is “capable of evoking . . . the sentiments which corresponds to the different manifestations” of a people’s distinct spirit, as this people struggles to assert itself as a specific life form.

Myth thus translates a people’s hopes and needs into their own idiom and feeds these hopes and needs back to them in ways that render them plausible and attractive.
[...]
As an unconscious but compelling life force, myth justifies a people, it explains why they differ from other people, it affirms them in their right to assert themselves as who they are, it defines them and their friends, just as it distinguishes them from their enemies. One might even follow Schelling in believing that myth is what founds a people as a community of consciousness.”

O’Meara followed up with a piece on secession, expanding on his ideas on the role of myth.

The discussion that I’ve seen thus far of O’Meara’s piece seems not to have arrived at any clear articulation of exactly what myth (other than O’Meara’s Republic) would animate our movement.

I’ve noticed that many of those commenting on the subject are those of the atheistic and sometimes anti-Christian faction of the right, those who insist that Christianity is inimical to our existence and must be jettisoned. Their idea of course is some kind of pre-Christian European paganism at the center of the myth. I admit my own bias readily, although I have been in earlier years a non-Christian and an explorer of various ‘alternative spiritualities.’
I just don’t think that a patched-together, reconstituted paganism would have the unifying power that would bring European-descended peoples together. Even if I thought such a hurriedly-constructed belief or myth would do it, it would at the outset exclude a great many Christian White people. And maybe that’s the point, for some who propose it.
I can’t help thinking of a previous effort to construct a new republic minus Christianity and all traces of the old order:

Many Jacobins were deists or atheists and were bitterly opposed to Christianity. In September 1793 a movement called De-Christianization began. The church was persecuted. Churches were vandalised and closed. The church of Notre-Dame was renamed the ‘Temple of Reason’.

In October a new calendar was adopted. Years were no longer counted from the birth of Christ. Instead they began on 22 September 1792, the first day of the republic. The year was divided into twelve months with names taken from nature. The seven day week was replaced by a ten day one.”

Even if this revolution was done again minus the persecutions and deaths, the idea of starting from scratch and erasing everything traditional is just not a promising beginning. It is never wise to try to reinvent the wheel, or to construct a society based on an ideological template, or a make-it-up-as-you-go plan. It is too hard to try to purge out some of the traditions, believing that they are harmful, without killing off some useful and beneficial traditions along with them.

Groen Van Prinsterer said:

State and society exist, and unless we want to live again like barbarians they had better exist. However, the historical state has been dissolved. Very well then, how shall the revolutionary state be formed?

In itself already, the very idea of forming a state at will is to be repudiated. Lamennais reminds us that it is a delusion of our age to think that a state can be constituted, or a society formed, from one day to the next, in the same way that a factory is erected. Societies, he observes, are not made: they are the “work of nature and time acting in concert.” Revolutionaries want “to create everything in an instant, to fashion everything from the imagination, to form society at a single casting so to speak, after an ideal model, just as one creates a bronze statue. Everywhere they substitute the arbitrary contrivances of the mind for the essential relations, for the simple and fruitful laws that are established of themselves, when not impeded, as the indispensable conditions of existence. . . . Having dissected whole peoples alive to search their entrails for the mysteries of the social organism, they believe that science must at last be complete and society perfectly understood. Given this confidence, nothing gives pause, nothing embarrasses. They constitute, and then they constitute some more. They write on a piece of paper that they are a monarchy, or a republic, and actually expect to be something in reality, to be a people, a nation.” Indeed; yet the absurdity of innovation is the only wisdom available to the Revolution as its principle unfolds. With law and history thrust aside, the builders have no rule save self-conceit and whim.”
[Emphasis mine].

Just as a nation or society cannot be constituted ‘from one day to the next’, neither can a myth. Myths are organic, too; they are a manifestation, like all aspects of culture, of the soul of the people who give birth to them. Myths arise out of the collective psyche, or soul, if you prefer, of the people. A myth embodies the beliefs and ideals of a people, and inspires that people. It binds generations one to another.

Can a myth be created to order? We might try to foster an environment and an attitude which favors the articulation of a ‘new’ myth, but I don’t know that we can create one out of whole cloth.

Need a myth be true? I won’t quibble in post-modernist fashion over what ‘truth’ is, or what it means. I mean ‘true’ in the plain sense of the word, as in factual or based on real events in history. Some myths are true in this sense, and some are based on true events and past experiences.

A myth must at least be fitting and true to the minds and souls and memory of the people from whom it comes.
So not just any old myth will do.

Can a new myth be summoned up from our race-memory that would serve a new purpose, such as creating a post-Christian New Europe or New America? I have my doubts. It would necessarily purge out much of old Europe or old America, and hence be something utterly disconnected from the past. Because, like it or not, old Europe (and old America as its offspring) was Christian for most of its existence. That theme is a recurring one at the Cambria Will Not Yield blog. As CWNY says, though, the old pagan beliefs are also part of the European soul, but I think we would be ill-advised to ‘step over’ Europe’s long Christian heritage and try to reach only for the pre-Christian pagan Europe, of which we have only patchy knowledge.

Europe’s Christian heritage is rich and it reverberates deeply in the traditions of those of European descent. To discard it because some people of today feel they have intellectually outgrown it, or because its moral principles makes some uncomfortable, is shortsighted.

How can we love Europe or our European forefathers and reject the thing they loved the most? How can we even know our European heritage if we expurgate the most important part of it? If we are not willing to at least accept the centrality of Christianity to our ancestors, how can we be said to be their sons and daughters?

At this point, I’m reminded of an experience I had in college. In my Art History classes, there was a young woman from Iran. She was faltering in the class, and our professor took me aside and asked me to informally tutor her, to study with her and explain things she didn’t understand. When I spent time with her, it was evident that the main thing she didn’t understand, and moreover, didn’t want to, was the Christian heritage of Europe. We were studying the art of the Renaissance period, and all the symbolism, all the Biblical illustrations and allusions, were impenetrable for her. She did not ‘get’ it, and did not particularly want to learn about it. It annoyed her. Thus she could never really come to an appreciation for the works of Michelangelo or Giotto or most of the European artists of those times. It was all a foreign language to her.

I realized it must be somewhat the same for many of those who have grown up in a secular, post-Christian society, where they are vaguely familiar with the outward forms of Christianity, but who are alien to the meanings behind the forms. You might call those meanings ‘myths’, though I emphasize that to the Christian, they are not fairytales or ‘cunningly devised fables’, but truths. And in those truths lie the beauty and the meaning. Sadly, without an apprehension of the truths behind the symbols, Western culture is largely a closed book to many. It’s little wonder that Western culture is fading away.

Over at The Heritage American, Stephen Hopewell has a nice post about Sir Walter Scott’s works, particularly The Lady of the Lake, and the ideals therein.

He muses on why this work, like Scott’s work generally, has been dropped from the school curriculum.

There is no doubt, though, that neither its content nor its style would have commended it to educators in the later 20th century. Scott’s extolling of traditional virtues like faith, chastity, valor, and honor in a hierarchical world of inherited positions did not reflect the modern egalitarian ideal. The actions of his characters were motivated largely by their given roles and their virtues or lack thereof; there was little of the psychological complexity favored in modern literature. And the flowery, descriptive style with its redundancy and its heavy rhymes was no longer considered to be good writing.

Not only that, Scott was under suspicion of being a source of dangerous ideas – of popularizing a fantasy code of honor that Mark Twain almost literally blamed for the Civil War. The famous passage, from Life on the Mississippi, is quoted in this recent, very derogatory article from The Atlantic:

Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still.

There may be aspects of Scott’s writing that merit Twain’s criticism (which in any case is deliberately exaggerated and probably more applicable to Scott’s imitators); but The Lady contains nothing that can be understood as a call to brash rebellion, let alone to acts of terror. It is true that the portrayal of the loyalty-unto-death bond uniting the members of Clan Alpine remind one the “band of brothers” rhetoric of the South during the Civil War:

Hail to the Chief who in triumph advances!
Honour’d and bless’d be the ever-green Pine!
Long may the tree, in his banner that glances,
Flourish, the shelter and grace of our line! (Canto II)
[...]
Scott, said people like Twain onward, portrayed people according to absurd, unlivable ideals instead of as they really are; in doing so, he impeded, or at least failed to help, the progress of the human race. Our real mission was now to transcend boundaries of clan, nation, and race so we could leave behind, once and for all, the ridiculous conflicts which these engendered.

But it was not Scott who lacked subtlety; it was us. He understood the importance of kinship and race, and who controls a narrow swathe of land, and the right of a traditional people to defend their way of life.”

Scott’s works were embodiments of the myths that animated the people of Europe for millennia. And they were solidly grounded in Christianity, and the European outgrowths thereof, namely chivalry.

Why cast about for some made-to-order myth when we have a very rich heritage and body of myth and lore from which to draw? Why try to patch together something new when we have an organic, living system that, although dormant, is not dead? Why reinvent the wheel?

Maybe ultimately we will have to go our separate ways, those of us who are Christian and who still owe our allegiance to ‘antique Europe’ and old America, and those who have decided to cut ties to our past and hitch their wagon to an unknown star.

The video is of a Dutch bluegrass band, believe it or not, and I think they do a superb job on this song, the best version I’ve found on YouTube. I hope you enjoy it as I did.

Someone asked for more ‘old America’ items, and this makes for 10 minutes or so of pleasant images of small town life back then.

Reading the thoughts of these Texas schoolchildren, we see repeated many of the cliched images of life in the future as envisioned through the imagination of that era. One child predicts flying cars, robot housemaids, moving sidewalks. It sounds as though this child has seen many episodes of the ‘paleo-futuristic’ cartoon, The Jetsons.
Or maybe not; these ideas were standard cliches in every kids’ cartoon set in the future, as well as in many Sci-Fi movies and stories.

Another child mentions the ubiquitous ‘food in capsule form’, which has been a standard feature of the ”old future” in movies and TV series for some time, going back at least to a 1930 movie called ”Just Imagine.”

Another child says:

I think in the year 2000 the earth will be much more polluted than it is.

I also think that we will have no more school, and cars can go as fast as they want without getting a ticket.

The government will pay every person as much as they want without them having to work. I also think we will be out of energy for stores or anything that uses fuel in the year 2000.”

That little girl’s thoughts are evidence that the leftist, environmentalist propaganda was being drummed into little children’s brains fairly successfully by 1976.

Another thought that occurs to me is that these children would now be about 42 or 43 years old, Gen-Xers. I wonder who they voted for? And I wonder if they still cling to the idea that ‘the government’ will ‘pay every person as much as they want without them having to work”? If they are Democrats, no doubt they have not altered their thinking on some of these matters since fourth grade.

I’ve written before about the ”old future”, or the future as envisioned by people who lived earlier in the 20th century. It’s an interesting thing to me because so much of what everyone in the mid-20th century believed to be inevitable has not come to pass. So many people in the 20th century assumed, perhaps because they lived in an era of rapid technological change, that we would continue to advance by leaps and bounds, and that the sky was literally the limit. As the beginning of the century saw the development of flight, and later decades saw the advent of jet planes, it seemed only logical to expect that next would be space flight, and colonies on neighboring planets.

The 1967 movie, 2001, envisioned shuttle service to the moon as a matter of course. Truth be told, that movie did not inspire me; it seemed too cold and sterile, and made space travel seem downright mundane and tedious. I suppose that was the message of the movie, the implication that we had to become ‘star children’ and explore inner space. But the world depicted in ’2001′ never came to be.

Recently, we saw the anniversary of the first moon landing, with Neil Armstrong being the first human being to step onto the moon’s surface. It’s hard to avoid wondering why the space program did not continue, and why we seemed to lose our optimism about the future, and the impulse to keep pressing on into space.

The obvious answer would be that we no longer have the money to fund such frivolities as space exploration. Now, of course, our country is financially foundering, with the most extravagant and senseless government spending spree of all time, and no end in sight.

But why did we not continue to explore space when we had the means to do so? Why did the space program tend to fizzle out? Did the disasters have anything to do with it? Or was it just that we, as a people lost interest and curiosity? Or was it just the constant liberal cries of ‘waste!’ that caused people to lose interest? I remember hearing a lot of complaining in the media about how ”we have no business spending money on useless spaceflights while there is so much suffering on this earth,” or sometimes race was brought into it: ”there are hungry black folk, and the government would rather waste money on the space program than take care of its people.”

As our social spending increased throughout the seventies and afterward, one wonders what might have been, had we not been pressured into the ”war on poverty”. In retrospect, did all that spending help ”pull people up from poverty” as promised, or result only in the demand for more money?

I’ve mused before on why our vaunted American optimism seems to have vanished in recent years. As a nation, we seem to have been diverted, dealing with intractable social problems which appear to get worse not simply in spite of our efforts, but actually because of our efforts to cure them. Perhaps seeing this downward trend has caused many people to feel more pessimistic about the future, whether they acknowledge it or not.

I’ve noted before that the science-fiction movies of our present era are dark, dystopian, and bleak, especially in comparison with those of 50+ years ago. Is our present, increasingly dystopian reality simply a result of our loss of confidence and optimism, or did the increasing presence of dark themes in our popular entertainment foster the pessimistic and cynical view? Which came first? Does art imitate life, or the opposite?

In an earlier blog entry I alluded to a Ray Bradbury interview which was an ”extra” on a DVD of Walt Disney’s ‘Tomorrowland’. Disney’s Tomorrowland was a prime example of the optimism about the future. But in that interview, Bradbury referred to what he termed ”the American blasphemy”, which I understood to mean something peculiar to the American spirit which caused Americans to ”oppose nature.” By that I understand the Western tendency to try to conquer, or at least tame, nature. However there is now a growing philosophy, mostly seen in the left and in the environmental movement, which sees this tendency as something malign and hubristic, something to be rooted out of us. The ‘climate change’ true believers think that our tendencies to try to overcome nature’s limitations are a particular disease of White males. They refuse to see that this ‘opposition to nature” is what has enabled us to create a much more livable society, a civilization which most of the rest of the world is determined to share, at our expense mostly.

Nothing in this world is an unmixed blessing; our technology has its downside. But to reject our urge to explore and to improve and to discover is to repress what seems to be innate in us, and to disparage what has been our strength, making it a weakness to be despised.

Perhaps the liberals among us feel ‘white guilt’ because we as a people excelled at this kind of thing, and thus caused the rest of the world to feel envious and resentful. Yet this is not a reason to deny our strengths.

And if we are constantly getting the implicit message that our accomplishments are actually a failing, is it any wonder that we’ve lost our sense of optimism and confidence as a people?

Meanwhile the schoolchildren of the 70s are now in early middle age, having been fed the propaganda since birth. Is it any wonder we’ve come to where we are now?

Perhaps in the coming decades, from the growing numbers of homeschooled children, who have (one hopes) been kept away from popular ‘entertainment’, will come the new ”optimistic futurists”. We will need such people to try to put the broken pieces of our civilization back together again.

Fortunately, I saved a couple of the comments, like this one:

It seems to work because it works at first when the number of minorities is small. And of those small groups, Whites are only exposed to the most adaptable and seemingly compliant. Things begin to change but too slowly for the average person to notice. And when Whites begin to feel uneasy, they compare the present to a past that was already altered by the minorities- fatal mistake. Whites should compare the unliveable present with a past that was really good not just a bit better. But most people are too young or if old eneough, too old to remember correctly, or if cogent, too socially conditioned to reason correctly from the data available. All of this is incrementalism – one of the great weapons used against our People. Too abstract? Ever ask yourself how you got into a terrible relationship? It’s because the person wasn’t like that when you first met them. They only gradually revealed themselves. If they did it all at once, you would have just left. This is incrementalism, the great weapon of the Evil. Thus all traditional societies emphasize memory as a divine faculty. Without it, you will have no valid data to reason from, but only files increasingly adulterated by propaganda. Yes, you will do it to yourself. The Maoists called it self-correction.
Posted by Freyr at 1:29 AM on March 11

And then there was this one, which despite spelling errors is a sound and sensible post:

Multiculturalism in the West is the result of our elites, both neoconservative and neomarxists, promoting globalization, both economic and social, meaning total intergration of the World’s finance and goverment. It is a universalist principle of free capital flow and migration of populations, not to mention outsourcing ect. But the most damaging product by far to come out of universalist principles was multiculturalism. The effect, most severly seen in places like Canada and esp. the U.K, was the total loss of the Whites in these “universal” countries of a sense of themselves as a people, the product of 3000 years of history. The Western peoples achieved the greatest civilization the world had known, and yet those who know it (few) can’t say it, and the young dont even understand the concept of Western history and culture. Multiculturalism stripped European descended peoples of their identity. It is in question weather our elites are going to change. The choice for ED peoples will then be either revolution or extinction.
Posted by White Canadian at 4:38 AM on March 11

I think both those comments hit on themes that we can’t emphasize enough. It is not for nothing that those in charge have systematically tried to rewrite history, or to efface all memory of it, so as to detach people from a past that they might notice was appreciably better.

I do encounter a lot of younger people (anybody who was raised under political correctness, which means anybody under 40, pretty much) who energetically deny that things were ever much better than they are today. I have had young people (who know only what they’ve been taught by their liberal teachers and Hollywood movies) tell me that ‘it was just as bad in the old days, but they just swept things under the rug.’

Personally, I can’t imagine arguing with my parents about what it was like in the World War II era, or the Depression, because I wasn’t around then. I never presumed that just reading a book about those days, however unbiased the book might be, would give me a real knowledge of what it was like to live in those times. Even less would I assume that, because I’ve watched many movies made in the 1930s that I therefore ”know” what it was like then. I still defer to my elders as to what was really true about those days.

As for myself, I often regret that while some of the older generation were still with us, I didn’t make it a point to write down or record their stories. My beloved late Grandmother wrote down, in longhand, her early recollections, and I still have access to that, but so many of my elders have left this world, and I feel I missed a chance to learn all that they had to tell about the past, about their daily lives as children.

My uncles and aunts and grandparents, great-uncles and great-aunts, were lively storytellers; they made every little anecdote entertaining and vivid. Nothing made me happier as a child than a big family get-together where everyone shared stories and recollections. I wonder how many children today have the inclination to listen to the old folks?

I regret that nobody in our family has taken the trouble to videotape some of the stories from the older generation.
I encourage those of you who still have the chance to record these things for posterity.

Reading history books is all well and good; I love to read history, but there is so much more out there that tells our collective story. Go to old newspapers and old books, magazines, ephemera of all sorts, even old photos. Getting it from the horse’s mouth, reading history as recorded at the time, is worth reading many contemporary books which to some extent filter the history through the distorting lenses of today.

If you still have elderly relatives or neighbors who have clear recollections of the past, take the time to listen to what they have to say. They are a neglected resource. We live in an age which devalues the old; by counting them as of little importance, we fail to acknowledge their experience and their possible insights.

The media and the captive educational establishment lie to us, and want us to believe that the world was always as it is now. This has reached such an absurd point that we now see movies in which blacks and Moslems roam Sherwood Forest, and ‘diversity’ prevails everywhere, although this was not the case at all.

A year or so ago on a blog which posts old photos, there was a class picture of some elementary school children in northern California in the early 60s. The second comment on the photo was an angry “Why aren’t there any African-Americans and Hispanics in this class?” The younger generations have been conditioned to believe that whenever they see a picture which is bereft of ”diversity”, that something is alarmingly wrong; some evil racists somewhere conspired to exclude African-Americans, Hispanics, and Moslems from their rightful place. Many can’t comprehend that this was once a majority White country, even in California, imagine that! And they can’t comprehend that it was not because there was a malicious effort to shut out ‘diversity’, but because it just worked out that way, in most cases. After all, blacks made up 10 percent or so of the population, and most blacks were concentrated in cities. How hard is it to understand, that being only 10 percent of the total population, blacks could not be everywhere?

I suppose that last fact is the reason why our government is now scrambling to fly in the ‘diversity’ to fill in for the missing black people in Maine, Kansas, Iowa, Tennessee, and soon, Montana.

The idea that diversity is an absolute must everywhere is a strange and bizarre notion that was not part of this country until the madness that began in the 1960s.

I find that to recharge my batteries, I need to pay regular visits to that old world, the world that was America before this collective psychosis set in, and remind myself of what it was like, who we were (and still are) at our best. I do this by reading old books and magazines, (many are available online; you need not clutter up your house with old books as I do), by watching old movies and videos on YouTube, by listening to music that is truly ours, from the Western traditions, and enjoying the visual arts from the glory days of the Western past.

As ‘Freyr’ says in the first comment I quoted above, memory as a divine faculty is an idea that for many centuries enabled a culture and a way of life to be passed down from one generation to the next. We have to recover our past and all that it embodied, if we hope to find our way back. Trying to reinvent ourselves as if from nothing is a hopeless task. We must build on the best of what still remains.

- Hinahan Cornwallis, in “The War for the Union, or the Duel Between the North and South: U.S.A. 1861-1865, A Poetical Panorama, Historical and Descriptive“

Just before the July 4th weekend began, the news channels, particularly Fox, were covering the re-opening of the Statue of Liberty’s crown.

During this coverage, the Fox News folks were chattering about the history of the Statue of Liberty, and they all made the statement that the statue and her torch were meant to ”show the way” for immigrants to come here. And inevitably they cited the poem by Emma Lazarus which is attached to the base of the statue. You know, the one about the ‘wretched refuse.’

Sadly, this is the perception of most Americans: the statue was put in place to beckon immigrants, and to act as a ‘vacancy’ sign for those looking for new digs.

As a symbol of America, the statue is probably the best-known, worldwide.
However, as one who is fascinated with old images and history, I’ve noted a lot of old ephemera with the image of a female figure known as Miss Columbia. She is usually a young woman, sometimes a more maternal lady, but dressed in classical robes, emblazoned with stars and stripes. Her image, of course, is the one at the top of this post. And for those who visit the forum, that’s also her image you see adorning the main page.

Lately, she is little known by most Americans. I’ve often wondered why, and an article from a while back poses that question.

Miss Columbia is “a literary name for the United States,” says Ellen Berg, a historian who researched the symbol’s origins and popularity at the Library of Congress during a fellowship last fall with the Swann Foundation.

She also wanted to know why it has faded from use.

At the height of the American Revolution, Miss Columbia, “came to represent the spirit of the country and American ideals,” says Dr. Berg, an affiliate assistant professor at the University of Maryland.”
[...]
Cartoonists played a key role in establishing the conventions of Miss Columbia’s portrayal.

“There are a number of cartoons where Columbia is a school teacher. That’s how I came to my knowledge of the subject and my interest. She was depicted often as welcoming to immigrants,” says Dr. Berg, a scholar of immigration history.

By the 1890s, women dressed up as Miss Columbia for patriotic events.

“In 1900, a girl’s ideal would be to be Miss Columbia in the Fourth of July Parade. Married women would do that, too.”

In 1900, the San Francisco Call published a story illustrated with seven pictures that showed wanna-be Miss Columbias how to dress and behave.

Cartoonists sometimes drew Miss Columbia draped in the American flag. .

Women who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan used Miss Columbia in a “Pageant of Protestantism” held in Indianapolis during the 1920s, but that is one of the rare, negative examples Dr. Berg found.
[...]
Edward J. Lordan, author of “Politics, Ink: How American Editorial Cartoonists Skewer Politicians, From King George III to George Dubya,” has a different theory about the symbol’s demise.

He believes Miss Columbia was better suited for the young American Colonies.

“Each symbol represents some aspect of America. When you have a new, fledgling, virginal country, then having a Miss Columbia would make sense,” says Dr. Lordan, a professor at West Chester University of Pennsylvania,

Columbia is virtuous and protective. As an example, he said there’s a famous cartoon of her saying to Abraham Lincoln, “Give me back my boys.

At the end of World War II, America emerged as a super power. That’s why Uncle Sam remains popular as a symbol, Dr. Lordan said, because it matches our vision of the country.
When we become the toughest guy out there, then we would go with somebody like Uncle Sam,” he says. “Uncle Sam is rolling up his sleeves. He’s going to go pound on somebody. All of these images only work if they resonate with the audience.”

Yes, Uncle Sam is often depicted in the old newspaper cartoons and advertising images as being a tough old geezer, about to teach someone a lesson.

However, it seems to me that Uncle Sam is seldom seen in today’s political cartoons compared to those of the past.
I have quite a few images of Uncle Sam among my ephemera. Why is he less popular now than in earlier eras?

Is his tough, no-nonsense kind of American attitude now too ”right-wing”? Or is our old uncle now too White to represent the ‘New America’? How long before somebody invents a swarthier, bilingual version of Uncle Sam?

As to why Miss Columbia disappeared, she may not have been edged out by our old Uncle, but by a female competitor.

V. C. Rogers, cartoonist for The Independent Weekly in Durham, N.C., disagrees with Dr. Lordan’s theory.

The beginning of the end to Miss Columbia’s image may have occurred when the Statue of Liberty was unveiled in New York Harbor in 1886, he believes. Resembling Miss Columbia in her draped gown and holding a torch, the statue was presented to the United States by France in recognition of the friendship established during the American Revolution.

But over the years, it also came to represent a beacon of freedom and democracy, particularly to the thousands of immigrants who landed in America at nearby Ellis Island.

“One of the reasons Miss Columbia has declined is that the Statue of Liberty has arisen,” Mr. Rogers says.”

This last is the reason that has occurred to me. The figure of Miss Columbia has been merged with Lady Liberty in most people’s minds. I’ve seen Columbia misidentified, as on some blogs recently, as ‘Lady Liberty.’

And the Statue of Liberty has almost religious connotations to some people, as it is associated with the mass immigration of the latter part of the 19th century-early 20th century. Immigration, in the new multicultural America, is almost a sacred ideal. The new America has been re-defined as not merely ‘a nation of immigrants’, but as the quintessential nation of immigrants, and sadly, as a model for all Western White nations to follow in multicuturalizing themselves out of existence.

This minister has a rather different take on what the Statue of Liberty means:

Mr. Williams said his statue’s essential point was that Christianity should be the guiding ethos of the nation. But because the church he leads is predominantly black, as is he, there is an added dimension to the message.

In “From Slavery to Lady Liberty: Lady Liberty’s African Connection: The Key to Black America’s Liberation,” he pointed out that the real Statue of Liberty wears a broken shackle around one ankle, and revisited evidence that the statue, a gift from France, was originally intended not to welcome immigrants but to celebrate the emancipation of slaves.

“Many blacks are not patriotic, and they are not patriotic because of the history of our nation,” Mr. Williams said in an interview at the church, in the richly appointed sitting room he uses to receive visitors. “It’s good for our people to know that the nation has something for them as well.”

I’ve never heard the theory about the statue as a commemoration of emancipation, but it may be true. In any case, I have heard that it was meant to commemorate the centennial of American Independence, and to signify friendship between France and our country. The lamp was not designed to usher immigrants our way, but to represent the lamp of liberty, as America ”lights the way” as an exemplar. Now it appears that most people see the torch as a welcome for everyone who wants to enter. ”Lady” Liberty, sadly, has now become something of a ”lady” of easy virtue, and as I wrote a few years ago, maybe the torch should have been made a red light, as the lady does not say no to anyone.

The poem at the base of the statue should be replaced with a ‘No Vacancy’ sign.

Miss Columbia (is it even permissible, in this era, to use the title ”Miss”?) was most often depicted as a maiden, virginal. I am afraid she would no longer be a suitable symbol in this promiscuous age.

It looks, to me, like a heartland American family from the turn of the last century. Looking at the expressions on their faces, as well as the body language, it appears that this is a happy, close-knit family. In a world which cynically devalues goodness and beauty, it’s a welcome change to look at a photo like this and to realize there was once such an America with such people in it.

This Fourth of July, it’s essential to remind ourselves of that.

The film is about, among other things, our old American virtue of thrift, as practiced by the typical American wife and mother. It is a nostalgic look back at the daily life of a time when most people, even the middle-classes and upper-middle classes, practiced a simpler way of life, with few pretensions. America was at its height of prosperity and plenty when this film was made (circa 1962) but people lived more modest lives then.

For those who remember the time, this is nostalgic; so much of this is familiar to me as part of my childhood.
Yes, I know those times are dead and gone, and can never be brought back. I say this because there is always someone who has to remind us of this when we look back. But though we can’t enter a time machine and go back, we can look back to glean what we can from those times, and perhaps try to correct some of the missteps we took along the way to today.

Just a caveat: some Lincolnolatry at the beginning, and beware some proto-Political Correctness and a nod to ‘diversity’ towards the end.

Candid readers, the “Catholic” theologians denouncing Notre Dame’s Obama protesters as like the Klan, badly need a refresher in irony. This man of blood, with his “Against abortion? Don’t have one,” is on the same logical and moral level as the antebellum slavers who said “Against slavery? Don’t own one.” And yes, there IS a place for Catholics who publicly dissent from the Church’s teaching authority — it’s called Lutheranism.

As is traditional, George Weigel deftly sees through the postures and rhetoric of Vatican II laicism about Obama at Notre Dame to ask cui bono, and the answer is: Obama’s, in the Electoral College:

In order to secure the political advantage Obama had gained among Catholic voters last November, the president of the United States decided that he would define what it means to be a real Catholic in 21st-century America…  He, President Obama, would settle the decades-long intra-Catholic culture war in favor of one faction — the faction that had supported his candidacy and that had spent the first months of his administration defending his policies…

Rather like Napoleon taking the diadem out of the hands of Pope Pius VII and crowning himself emperor, President Obama has, wittingly or not, declared himself the Primate of American Catholicism…

What the bishops of the United States have to say about this usurpation of their authority will be very interesting to see. Whether Obama’s Catholic acolytes will recognize a genuine threat to religious freedom in what they are already celebrating as their Notre Dame victory over the pro-life yahoos and reactionaries will also be instructive.

Indeed.  This is, of course, a live issue not only in Roman Catholic (and Orthodox) moral theology and Church governance, but in Constitutional law as well, which necessarily and passionately engages evangelical and other traditionalist Protestants.  These include once-and-future Republican Presidential candidate Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR), who during his campaign last year made the slavery/abortion analogy for federal law explicit, with some learning lightly worn about the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Dred Scott v. Sandford:

What are we saying to the generation coming after us when we tell them that it is perfectly OK for one person to own another human being?  I thought we dealt with that 150 years ago when the issue of slavery was finally settled in this country, and we decided that it no longer was a political issue, it wasn’t an issue of geography, it was an issue of morality. That it was either right or it was immoral that one person could own another human being and have full control even to the point of life and death over that other human being.

Huck is politically shrewd as well as ethically principled here.  An Old America strategy of invoking the natural law that undergirds the civil, is essential to conservatives’ building big enough coalitions to defeat the secular Left electorally on issues like the sanctity of life and marriage.  It was for instance the fervent participation of the black and Latino churches of California in the Yes on 8 campaign last fall, that enabled us to beat back the homosexual “marriage” lobby here (a majority of whites in the state, nine to nothing concentrated in the liberal littoral, voted to sacramentalize sodomy).

In this connection, herewith video of Dr. Alan Keyes, Obama’s Republican opponent in the 2004 Illinois Senate race, arrested for trespass along with 21 others at Notre Dame, while peacefully praying the Rosary to protest Obama’s presence.  The actual taking into custody, when the police replace the Rosary around Keyes’ wrists with handcuffs, is at about 2:20 in:

A picture or rather video is worth a thousand words; it started precisely this way with Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., one recalls.

]]> http://vanishingamerican.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/americas-secret-weapon-c-1942/ Fri, 08 May 2009 09:26:00 +0000 vanishingamerican http://vanishingamerican.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/americas-secret-weapon-c-1942/
The text of the ad is not legible unless you right-click on the image, but below is the essential part of the text:

If The Wizard of Oz was made today Dorothy would be forced into therapy, Auntie Em would be charged with child abuse and Toto would be put to sleep for biting.

Today Tonto would be in charge and the Lone Ranger would be the sidekick.

Rawhide couldn’t be made today without being sued by PETA for cruelty to animals.

I remember when things were much different.

Kids actually enjoyed playing outside and parents weren’t afraid they’d be kidnapped. Nor did they worry about what their kids saw on the movie screen.

We raised the flag on Mount Surabachi and didn’t care if we offended the Japanese.

We knew who the enemy was and when we went to war we tried to win no matter the cost.

Our chests swelled with pride when our loved ones serving in the military came home and we wanted them to wear their uniform. The entire town was proud to shake their hand.

We went to the moon and were proud that the rest of the world envied us.

We trusted our leaders to tell the truth.

The government took in more money than it spent and income taxes weren’t more than the previous generation earned.

The car payment wasn’t as much as the house payment yet the car makers still made a profit.

You didn’t need a credit score to finance a home. You needed references and a down payment.

Companies closed when they went bankrupt instead of being bailed out by tax payers.

The news media reported the facts and nothing else.

There was a city sponsored Christmas display on city owned property and businesses used the word “Christmas” in their ads.

Students said the Lord’s Prayer and recited the Pledge of Allegiance before class every morning.

Every teacher had a paddle in her desk and used it without having to ask parents’ permission. And if you got into trouble at school you were in even more trouble when you got home.

Twelve year old girls acted and dressed like twelve year old girls. And mothers of twelve year old girls acted and dressed like mothers.

Parents taught us right from wrong and to love our country. They were parents and not their children’s best friends.

Maybe that’s what has happened to America. Parents aren’t parents anymore.

That’s my 2 cents.

5 posted on 02/21/2009 8:39:27 PM PST by Terry Mross (I Hate All Politicians, Republicans Included.)

Occasionally, somebody at Free Republic posts something worth quoting, like the above.
I don’t know if the poster is the author of the words above, or merely quoting them from somewhere, but the piece makes some good points, in a down-to-earth way, and with a little humor.It brings home the difference between the old America, to which I often make reference here, and the new, post-American, 21st century America.

I am coming to believe, more and more each day, that we are living in a very different country than the one in which I grew up, and this strange, brave new America is populated by people I hardly recognize as being my countrymen. Now, I’m not necessarily talking about the tens of millions of foreign people who are now in our country, but the people who are outwardly American but inwardly citizens of that other America.

‘The past is another country; they do things differently there.’ It certainly seems as if the post-Americans see people like me as aliens, as people who are more incomprehensible to them than the most exotic new arrival in this country who speaks no English.

The post-Americans see no enemies, in fact, except people like me, and by extension, all of pre-PC America, that bad old America where people did not obey the dictates of political correctness, and in fact would not even understand that term. How blessedly lucky they were, those old Americans.

As I begin a fourth year of blogging, I wish I could be feeling more upbeat about the blog as well as the future, but as of this moment, I am not enjoying blogging as I should. This blog should be a labor of love, but it is not always so, and often that’s because of the nature of the subjects I write about here. I suppose there’s not much fun and pleasure to be expected in blogging about the turmoil and uncertainty that dominates this strange new country we now live in; I write about subjects that are at best, controversial (because taboo) and at worst, capable of stirring up considerable anger and vituperation.

Everybody who frequents this blog knows that I don’t brook much incivility from commenters; I basically have a ‘one strike, you’re out’ policy. Everybody gets one chance to make their points civilly and reasonably; those who can’t or won’t do that simple thing are deleted and/or banned.

Some people say this is not in the spirit of ‘free speech’, yet I think I have tradition on my side when I refuse to tolerate abusive, rude, uncivil, or just plain nasty posts, or posts that do not argue ideas or advance the discussion in any way.

Occasionally somebody comes across this blog, and seems angered almost to the point of incoherence at the very existence of anybody who does not think as they do, and does not conform to the party line. Sometimes the level of their rage takes me aback; I cannot understand why they are so angry at the fact that some people see things differently. And I really don’t understand why they are so unreasoningly furious at what amounts to the conventional thinking of old America. The thoughts and opinions I express here, which continue to make some people spitting mad, are more or less the opinions that prevailed in my grandparents’ day and even in my parents’ time, before the era of political correctness. Those who call me names are by inference condemning all the earlier generations who held to the now-controversial views I express here on this blog.

The comments that are nothing more than ad hominems and nasty personal attacks on me, (or on others), my character, my supposed life, my ancestry, and oftentimes my Christian faith, are deleted in most cases, so that they may not necessarily be seen by everybody before being deleted.

After years of using the Internet, I am still staggered by the casual cruelty, and the level of nastiness between total strangers. It amazes me that people can make insinuations and judgments about the personal lives and character of strangers on the Internet. I find plenty of bloggers with whom I disagree, but I would not dream of leaving comments attacking them as people, insulting their character, their personal beliefs and life choices. Who are these people who have no qualms about attacking unknown others on the Internet in that fashion?

Occasionally some Job’s Comforter ‘helpfully’ tells me that I need to develop a thicker skin to be a blogger. This may be true; only people with hides like hippos and egos the size of a small planet really should blog. I am not that thick-skinned and neither am I a glutton for abuse. So I probably should not blog — but I feel a need and a compulsion to keep doing so. Perhaps I should close comments, but I prefer to keep them open. I like the feedback from the reasonable, civil, thinking, decent people out there. I need to know you are out there so as to counterbalance the hostiles and the ‘tolerance tyrants’ and the other assorted attack dogs of the blogosphere. So I prefer to keep comments open.

A word to my antagonists, including my most recent antagonist, who left several paragraphs of insults, slurs, and vitriol: if I preview your comments and see that kind of content, I will simply stop reading what you have to say, just as I would hang up my phone if I picked it up and someone started shouting profanity and abuse at me. Life is too short to endure the diatribes. Expect to have such comments deleted mostly sight unseen. I feel no qualms about deleting such venom and most likely I will ban the perpetrator.

Neither do I claim to be an exemplary Christian; my faith is often a target of abuse and derision, and I know that’s to be expected; the Bible my enemies deride tells me Christians will be hated. I accept that. However I am not yet very good at turning the other cheek to attackers; I am likely to respond with sharp language — another reason for me to delete baiting comments which might lead me to say some unkind things myself.

I will hear out those who can make their points with facts or counter-arguments, in a civil and polite and respectful way. I don’t brook rudeness in my living room, and this blog is my living room in a sense, and I decide who is to be a guest here and who is not, based on their attitude and behavior.

It’s clear that the citizens of the ‘new America’ don’t believe in things like civility, courtesy, manners, and they have no use for respecting differing opinions. And it seems not to matter if these post-Americans are 20 years old or 50 years old, they behave like tantrum-throwing adolescents. It’s hard for me to fathom that people who behave so uncivilly might be not immature young people but middle-aged, and professionals, even, let’s say, government workers in responsible positions. It’s alienating to realize that even those working for ”our” government may see us as the enemy.

The inability to communicate that marks the relationship of the post-American ‘progressives’ or liberals to the citizens of old America seems to betray the fact that we are no longer one nation; they and we may both speak standard American English, and we may look similar on the surface, but we are no longer the same people, no longer brethren. We truly are two nations now in fact, if not by law. We no longer acknowledge the same ideas and ideals; we no longer acknowledge the same history that should bind us together; they’ve rewritten history. The post-Americans have abandoned the traditions and conventions of social behavior that once were common to all of us who called ourselves Americans.

When we find ourselves divided by insurmountable differences, it would seem that the most civilized way to handle that is to go our separate ways in every area of life, so as to minimize the conflict and the rancor. But it seems, paradoxically, that the post-Americans, who preach tolerance and ‘peace’ are not happy to live and let live; they desire to compel conformity to their ideas on everyone, by force if necessary, and at minimum, by verbal abuse and harassment.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to avoid those whose views are offensive or unacceptable to us; it takes a totalitarian mentality to try to bully others into conforming to our ideas, and that is what our enemies do.

Perhaps this blog needs to contain a warning to the ‘tolerance tyrants’: something conveying the idea that if you are unable to bear the thought that some remnants of the old America still exist somewhere, and that some people actually differ with you, then please click away from this politically incorrect blog and find some safe haven among those who think exactly as you do.

I know that there are people out there who are itching to try to silence all politically incorrect, old American views. And I sense their great vexation and frustration at the fact that free speech still exists. They believe that free speech extends only to those who accept the PC dogma; no dissent is allowed. They are itching to pass ‘hate speech’ laws which would silence dissenting views. That day may come, as it appears that too few people are willing to oppose the PC juggernaut. But until then, people like me and many of my readers, with unpopular and nonconforming points of view, people who do no more than follow the old paths trodden by past generations, still have a right to speak our minds and to be heard. I know that that fact angers many people almost beyond words. But as of now, that’s the reality.

Is there any going back to the old America described at the beginning of this entry? It may be, sadly, that we can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, we can’t put the PC genie back in the bottle. But we can only try to maintain what has not been destroyed yet, and to restore as much of what has been damaged. The old America still exists, if we keep it alive, and if we refuse to yield to the PC vandals.

I am sure some of you are aware of this new group blog with an agrarian/crunchy slant; if not, I would like to call your attention to it. There are already a few fine pieces up there, but I particularly like ‘A Republic of Front Porches’ by Patrick Deneen. I’ve blogged before about the significance of the old-fashioned front porch, and about how its demise has impoverished our sense of community. So that subject is close to my heart.

From Deneen’s piece:

Our States, not to mention our localities, are ever-less a kind of “porch,” that transition from the world of the home to the public realm of community and eventually State and nation. Instead, as wholly “private citizens” – or, to invoke the preferred term, “consumers” – accustomed to houses that are places of private retreat, we see only one public entity of significance – the national State – but find it difficult to see ourselves a part of it. We regard the State as a distant and mysterious entity, occupied either by our team or their team but in either event an organization so vast, complex and dizzying that we regard it as anything but the locus of our practice of shared self-governance. We are daily less a republic because we daily perceive less of what are common or public things – res publica. Without the literal spaces where we come to know what we have in common through speech, habit and memory, we regard politics as a competitive spectator sport and government as a distant imposition – but in any event, anything but self-rule.

Read the entire piece, and check out the other posts on the blog as well.

I have seen so many statements by various people in discussions, asserting that old-line WASPs essentially colluded with the destruction of this country via immigration and leftist social engineering. In many people’s minds, the WASPs are the arch-villains in the history of the country; it’s popularly assumed that they were extreme liberals and practically the originators of the idea of the ‘proposition nation’ and its eventual mutant offspring, multiculturalism and mass immigration. To the contrary, according to the quotes from several sources presented in the series of blog posts. I would suggest reading the several pieces following the linked piece; scroll upwards to read the later ones.

It seems to me that in our politically correct era, it is allowable to blame WASPs as a group while criticizing those of other ethnicities is a violation of PC. So the WASPs continue to be the favored whipping boy, despite the fact that WASPs are not the influential group they once were, many years ago.

This old piece from TIME, which I’ve cited before, originally appeared some 40 years ago. It describes a state of affairs that no longer exists:

Wasps dominate the governing bodies of the richest universities in a ratio of four to one. More than four-fifths of the directors of the largest foundations are Wasps; of the 37 officers and directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, only one is non-Wasp. Under pressure of law and of the meritocratic “cult of performance,” Wall Street law firms and brokerage houses are making room for more Jews and Catholics, but they are still overwhelmingly Wasp-controlled.

The Federal Government has always been the domain of the Wasp. Until John Kennedy, every U.S. President was a Wasp, and so was every Vice President except Charles Curtis (1929-33), who was the son of an Indian. Last fall’s candidates, Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, were quite predictably Wasps. Although the civil service has been a traditional path of advancement for non-Wasps (half of Post Office workers in the large cities are Negroes), the prestigious departments, such as State, are still run by Wasps. Congress is a Wasp stronghold: the newly elected one consists of 109 Catholics, 19 Jews, 10 Negroes, 3 Greek Orthodox, 4 Orientals and almost 400 Wasps. Committee chairmanships are largely in the hands of Wasps. Enlisted men in the armed services are an ethnic mix, but the officers are heavily Wasp. Even in the cities they no longer control politically—Chicago or Cleveland—Wasps have much behind-the-scenes power.”

For some strange reason, many people seem to believe that there is still some kind of WASP elite lurking in the shadows, leading the globalist cabal. However, this seems ludicrous to me; the old-line WASP families are hardly the dominant force they once were, as illustrated by the pie chart in this post showing that the religious affiliations of the business elites is not predominantly that of the typical WASP.
In another post we see that the CFR is not dominated by WASPs as popularly supposed.

Blogger ‘n/a’ quotes the words of E. Digby Baltzell in The Protestant Establishment:

Except for the captains of industry, whose money-centered minds continued to welcome and encourage immigration because they believed it kept wages down and retarded unionization, most old-stock Americans were frankly appalled at the growing evils of industrialization, immigration and urbanization. As we have seen, the closing decades of the nineteenth century were marked by labor unrest and violence; many men, like Henry Adams, developed a violent nativism and anti-Semitism; others, following the lead of Jane Addams, discovered the slums and went to work to alleviate the evils of prostitution, disease, crime, political bossism and grinding poverty; both Midwestern Populism and the Eastern, patrician-led Progressive movement were part of the general protest and were, in turn, infused with varying degrees of nativism; [. . .]

In so many ways, nativism was part of a more generalized anti-urban and anti-capitalist mood. Unfortunately, anti-Semitism is often allied with an antipathy toward the city and the money-power. Thus the first mass manifestations of anti-Semitism in America came out of the Midwest among the Populist leaders and their followers. In the campaign of 1896, for example, William Jennings Bryan was acused of anti-Semitism and had to explain to the Jewish Democrats of Chicago that in denouncing the policies of Wall Street and the Rothschilds [. . .]

Nativism was also a part of a status revolution at the elite level of leadershiop on the Eastern Seaboard. “The newly rich, the grandiosely or corruptly rich, the masters of the great corporations,” wrote Richard Ofstadter, “were bypassing the men of the Mugwump type–the old gentry, the merchants of long standing, the small manufacturers, the established professional men, the civic leaders of an earlier era. In scores of cities and hundreds of towns, particularly in the East but also in the nation at large, the old-family, college-educated class that had deep ancestral roots in local communities and oftend owned family businesses, that had traditions of political leadership, belonged to the patriotic societies and the best clubs, staffed the government boards of philanthropic and cultural institutions, and led the movements for civic betterment, were being overshadowed and edged saside in making basic political and economic decisions. . . . They were less important and they knew it.”

Many members of this class, of old-stock prestige and waning power, eventually allied themselves with the Progressive movement. Many also, like Henry Adams, withdrew almost entirely from the world of power. The “decent people,” as Edith Wharton once put it, increasingly “fell back on sport and culture.”
[...]
The Right Reverend Phillips Brooks–the favorite clergyman among Philadelphia’s Victorian gentry, who was called to Boston’s Trinity Church in 1869 [. . .] was one of the most sensistive barometers of the brahmin mind. Thus, although he himself had graduated from the Boston Latin School along with other patricians and plebeian gentlemen of his generation, he first suggested the idea of Groton to young Peabody in the eighties and joined the Sons of the Revolution in 1891, because, as he said at the time, “it is well to go in for the assertion that our dear land at least used to be American.”

While in the TIME article, which was written at a later time, we read that

To some extent, Wasps are presiding over the dissolution of their own dominion, and they are proud of it. In a book he wrote four years ago, The Protestant Establishment, Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell criticized upper-class Wasps for establishing a caste system in many places. Today, he gives them credit for being neither “arrogant nor insensitive. They are the least prejudiced people as far as intermarriage is concerned. Catholics are much more prejudiced and Jews are the worst of all.”

Actually, if you read through n/a’s posts, you will see that statistically, Catholics and Jews seem to intermarry more.

But again, it seems evident that there are few predominantly old-stock Anglo-Saxons who have remained ethnically intact; New England itself became one of the first regions to receive large numbers of ethnic immigrants in the latter part of the 19th century, and in fact they were as Old Atlantic suggests, ‘ethnically cleansed’ in many areas by the Ellis Island wave of immigrants. Just look at the large number of ethnic surnames in New England now. Many of the old-stock WASP New Englanders went on to the Midwest or the Far West in the 19th century, pioneering there. Many of my Fairbank relatives settled the Midwest, along with many from New England. So the Midwest was and may still be (to some extent) a stronghold of old-stock WASPs, although many intermarried with German or Scandinavian settlers of those states.

I have no high hopes that any of the evidence will convince those who blame WASPs for their alleged role in the betrayal of old America; they serve too useful a purpose as the focus of blame. The fact that few people will stand up and identify themselves as WASPs these days in America makes them a popular target for those who want to blame our own for what is happening to our country.

And again, as I’ve said, the WASPs are usually resented by many of later immigrant stock; the WASPs committed the unpardonable sin of being here first (and yes, I know there were Dutch and French and others here in the 17th century; some were my ancestors) and of being the most successful, the people who really laid the groundwork for this country not only in a physical sense, but in a philosophical and cultural sense. This primacy makes them a popular target of envy and resentment especially on the part of later arrivals. Success is an unforgivable sin, for some.

If I have to blame my WASP ancestors for anything, it’s for being just liberal enough, despite their supposed intolerance, to tolerate mass immigration which ended up displacing them in New England, and which has ultimately led towards the tidal wave of immigration which is today obliterating our country, threatening to displace all of us.

He uses the dramatic changes in San Francisco since the mid-20th century as an illustration of the changes in all of America since then, and I think it’s apt. Granted, San Francisco is not what I would call ‘typical’ traditional America; it may well have been closer to that at an earlier time in its existence, but by the time I first visited it in the late 60s, at a time of my youthful naivete, it was already rather a law unto itself, with topless bars and men dressed as women, and of course Haight-Ashbury, with its bizarre display.

Seiyo, however, contrasts the San Francisco of Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ with the sci-fi version of San Francisco in the 21st century, with its air of brazen decadence. I had to smile at his mention of the Chinese-American lesbian police chief, who has been conspicuous in TV news coverage of San Francisco, dressed in a uniform which looks as though it was designed for a male of considerably larger proportions. That itself is rather appropriate in an ironic way, and it’s a testament to how insanely devoted to political correctness our age has become.

I’ve written on several occasions about my love for old movies, by which I really mean old, not five years old, but real old relics of the pre-PC era. I’ve written about how watching such movies often leaves me with a wistful feeling, evoking my childhood memories of real America, traditional America, before we were forcibly ‘enriched’ with ‘diversity’, and before we were taught to speak and think in that quaintly sinister language of euphemisms and lies called ‘political correctness.’

Sometimes old movies cause a feeling of nostalgia and longing for the past, but sometimes they inspire a fierce, smoldering indignation at what has been done to my country, and at what is still being done.

Old movies can be an educational experience for those who have enough common sense to notice the jarring disconnect between the old America on the screen and the ‘new’ America which they see around them. The new and ‘improved’, diverse America is graffiti-defaced, crowded, often squalid, full of people who are strangers to each other in every possible way.

Whenever I speak about the lost world of the old movies, somebody, usually someone of the liberal or leftist persuasion, will bluntly claim that ‘that world never existed. The movies whitewashed things and censored things, covering up the injustices and hatreds that were really there.’ And the leftist or liberal is always adept at finding some flaw or failing in the old America: ”people were sexist and misogynist! There were no African-Americans in these movies except in subservient roles!”

My response is that while the movies may have presented a slightly manicured and polished version of reality, the underlying truth of old America was presented as it was. So when we see the well-dressed, presentable, civilized citizens of San Francisco, we are seeing the America that truly existed then, which was an America of mostly clean, well-behaved people, a place where order and common sense and civility still prevailed.

Seiyo mentions the role played by mass immigration in the drastic transformation of California, from the images seen in Vertigo and in ‘North by Northwest’. This goes without saying. but it’s amazing how few people seem to want to see a connection; many people act as if what is happening to California or to their own towns is some kind of fluke, due to blind forces of nature, rather than a conscious, malicious policy.

I know I have visited these themes repeatedly, but I will pose the same questions again, even if I am only asking myself: what happened to the people who inhabited the old America, the people who are seen as the extras in the Hitchcock movies? Are they all dead and six feet under now? Some, obviously, are still with us, but how did the good, common-sense inhabitants of the old America become the docile, vacant, ‘pod people’ as Seiyo calls them, of today? How did they go from sanity to becoming PC pod people, acquiescing meekly and passively to this grotesque experiment that is being carried out on our country and our people?

We can revisit the same explanations: brainwashing, due to leftist control of the media and the educational system; the fall of organized Christianity to the same pernicious influences, the culture of passivity reinforced by TV and video-game addictions, the therapeutic culture, which accentuates narcissism and neurotic self-obsession, the hedonism which diverts the attention and the energy of many young people who should be exercising leadership. We could go on and on. Some focus on the Jewish role in all this; some say Christianity is to blame (although Christianity’s influence is waning), some say it’s feminism and the destruction of the family. Some even suggest that the fluoride in our water supply induces passivity.

There are elements of truth, I think, in all of these.

If we believe any of these, or all of these, does heredity hold the power that I believe it does? Certainly heredity is not all, but neither is its influence negligible or nil, as leftists and tabula rasa believers insist. Are we merely passive products of our environment? Can we go from being self-respecting, self-confident, assertive, sensible people to being vacant receptacles for propaganda in such a short time, as the deterioration of our society suggests?

If the former is true, if environment is paramount and people can be shaped or re-shaped by the manipulative elites, then there seems little hope, since they hold all the cards, it appears. But if there is such a thing as hereditary influence on temperament and character, then perhaps we might hope that our ancestors’ strength will re-assert itself.

I have not mentioned the idea that our problem is in large part a spiritual deficit; we’ve abandoned the faith of our fathers and we’ve made ourselves idols, among them self and pleasure and power. Many of us place our faith in flawed human beings or institutions, which is not what our forefathers counseled, and not what Christianity teaches.

Many of those who call themselves Christians are being led astray by ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’, either church leaders or popular writers of ‘religious’ books. Some are being led astray by political wolves in sheeps’s clothing, or political parties and personages (Republicans, mainly) which become idols for some Christians. In any case, we are in need of a spiritual awakening as well as a political one.

I get the sense that things are accelerating, and being moved along very fast now; it’s evident in some of the news stories that are being discussed here and elsewhere. Are they testing the waters? Trying to provoke a response from the few holdouts who haven’t fully submitted?

Whether the ‘elites’ are intending it or not, they are showing their hand; it’s obvious now that there is an agenda, a ‘new world order’ plan, and that all Western countries are on the same track. Their brazenness can help things for us; it might alert some of the somnolent ones among us, and it might also show us just how passive most people have become.

I say as I’ve always said that it’s always the few who bring about real changes; the question is, will it be the few who are truly driving this multicult madness, or will it be the few on our side, the patriots, the people who love their kin and honor their fathers?

In the article, Fennell suggests reasons why the birth rate has fallen in the West.

There have been many instances of human groups not reproducing themselves, to the point of self-extinction or absorption into larger groups. The most common case has been a previously isolated tribe, when an outside agency has invaded and disrupted its way of life. The set of behavioural rules its members had worked out for themselves, and that made sense to them as a framework for life, gets disordered beyond repair.

They find themselves trying to live by a combination of rules that are partly remnants of their system, partly alien rules imposed on them. This haphazard combination does not make sense to them as a framework for life. So increasingly the will to reproduction flags, because it does not make sense to them to bear children into a senseless life.

It is likely that there is a similar reason for the flagging will of white westerners to reproduce their kind.”

The scenario that Fennell describes is most often cited as being the process by which American Indians were marginalized in their ancestral lands. The thinking is that as alien White culture imposed its rules on them, they became disoriented, unable to correlate their existing worldview and traditions with the new ways imposed by conquering Whites. The result, in the jargon of the social sciences, was ”anomie”, in which a sense of displacement and loss of identity and purpose led to social ”dysfunctions” of various sorts, often manifested in self-destructive or aimless behaviors.

I don’t know to what extent this is fact; I tend to take a lot of social science theories with a considerable helping of salt, but there seems to be an undeniable core of truth to it.

In our own case, Fennell suggests that our present crisis began in the post-WWII era:

Then, beginning at the end of the second World War, white westerners, first in the United States, then in America’s post-war European satellites, embarked on a great experiment. For the best of reasons – the pursuit of more justice, wealth and empowerment for all – they replaced many of the rules of European civilisation with new rules. Or rather, their democratic governments did this, employing left-liberals as their ethical guides, and enjoying enthusiastic support from the business corporations. The main rush of rule change took place in the 1960s and 1970s. Most white westerners, especially the younger generations, have made the new rules their own and have been living by them, or trying to.
[...]
People always assess for sense the collection of rules presented to them as a framework for life. They do so instinctively, drawing on generations of inherited experience. The point I am making is that this new collection of rules which white westerners have given themselves probably does not pass that litmus test. Probably it strikes growing numbers of them, deep down, as senseless, and therefore as a life framework which it does not make sense to bear children into.”

I think there is some validity to this. In some ways, I think people have a great deal of trouble trying to make sense of what are conflicting beliefs and ‘rules’ for living, some of which are remnants of the old American rules, and most of which are diametrically opposite dogmas of the ‘new’ and ‘improved’ post-Sixties America. And the two cannot be smoothly blended together; there are inherent contradictions and conflicts that cannot be denied away or ignored. They are felt at a visceral level, and one need not be a politically-minded or racially-minded person to realize that there are clashing principles at work in our post-modern world. Fennell rightly notes that the new, PC left-liberal principles are also intrinsically flawed, being based on ideology rather than human nature or on reality.

Fennell does not think it likely that we will be able to address this conflict, much less correct it in time to reverse the suicidal trends in Western society. He notes that it is in the interests of some of the powerful elements of our society for the present unhealthy system to continue, since our ”successful consumerist system” in his words, is dependent on the new ideology.

However, if our ‘successful consumerist system’ is merely a house of cards which is about to collapse, as we begin to suspect, then perhaps all bets are off.

As to whether Fennell’s assessment of the cause or the source of our malaise is accurate, I don’t think that it can be so neatly traced to the post-WWII era. I think the seeds were there long before, as we’ve discussed here a number of times. We can see some very obvious watershed events during the postwar era, especially as the 50s and 60s progess, which in retrospect are obviously important turning points. We often cite the infamous 1965 Immigration Act, or the Hart-Celler Act, as the most flagrant step towards changing the very character and makeup of America, but in order for us to have reached that point, the groundwork had to have been laid previously. Such legislation would, I think, have been much less likely to have passed in a less ‘diverse’ America, and of course even by 1965, America was no longer the staunchly Anglo-Saxon Protestant country it had been at the beginning.

Just consider this Time Magazine piece from 1969 (H/T race/history/evolution notes)
Are the WASPs coming back? Have they ever been away?

The most striking thing to me as I read this piece — or re-read it, as I think I remember reading it back in 1969 — is that even by 1969, the definition of WASP is in dispute. The article dithers on about just who is a WASP, while it should be cut-and-dried. A WASP is a White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. But no, the article clouds and obfuscates the issue, already busy deconstructing, I suppose:

Purists like to confine Wasps to descendants of the British Isles; less exacting analysts are willing to throw in Scandinavians, Netherlanders and Germans. At the narrowest, Wasps form a select band of well-heeled, well-descended members of the Eastern Establishment; at the widest, they include Okies and Snopeses, “Holy Rollers” and hillbillies. Wasps range from Mc-George Bundy and Penelope Tree to William Sloane Coffin Jr. and Phyllis Diller. Generously defined, Wasps constitute about 55% of the U.S. population, and they have in common what Columnist Russell Baker calls a “case of majority inferiority.”

A Quiet Retreat

Sometimes Wasps are treated like a species under examination before it becomes extinct. At the convocation of intellectuals in Princeton last month, Edward Shils, professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, announced: “The Wasp has abdicated, and his place has been taken by ants and fleas. The Wasp is less rough and far more permissive. He lacks self-confidence and feels lost.” Other observers feel that the growing dissension in American life is a clear sign that the Wasp has lost his sting, that his culture no longer binds. The new radicals and protesters are not in rebellion against Wasp rule as such, but they deride the Wasp’s traditional values, including devotion to duty and hard work.”

Well, it is rather ironic that WASPs are actually being prematurely declared extinct now, just shy of 40 years since the article appeared. Or perhaps the plan was in the works then; I have little doubt that it was.

But notice, too, the description of the WASP as ‘lacking self-confidence’ and feeling ‘lost.’ So it would appear the rot had set in, or was this article just propaganda to instill the very lack of confidence and sense of ‘lostness’ that it purports to describe?

The article jauntily points out that not all WASPs are White, Anglo-Saxon, or Protestant; apparently anybody can ‘be’ a WASP, with the right sort of attitude or connections or education, even blacks or other ethnics:

Non-Wasp groups are far better represented in Ivy League schools than they used to be: Jews, for instance, constitute about 25% of the student bodies. So traditional an Episcopal prep school as Groton now includes some 25 Roman Catholics, a dozen Negroes and three Jews. Jews stand out sharply in the nation’s intellectual life, and Jewish novelists are beginning to overtake the fertile Wasp talent. Scarcely a single Wasp is a culture hero to today’s youth; more likely he is the bad guy on the TV program, where names like Jones and Brown have replaced the Giovannis and O’Shaughnessys. The banker who made Skull and Bones is no model for undergraduates, writes Sociologist Nathan Glazer in FORTUNE. “Indeed, often the snobberies run the other way—the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, generally from a small town or an older and duller suburb, is likely to envy the big-city and culturally sophisticated Jewish students.”
[...]
Ultimately, Waspism may be more a state of mind, a pattern of behavior, than a rigid ethnic type. Some non-Wasps display all the characteristics normally associated with the most purebred Wasps. Consciously or not, they are Waspirants. Many people were surprised to learn that Edmund Muskie, who talked and looked like a Down East Yankee, was actually of Polish descent. Edward Brooke, who was successfully promoted for the U.S. Senate by civic-spirited Wasps, has all the attributes of a well-bred Wasp, as does Whitney Young Jr. One doesn’t have to be white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant to be a Wasp in spirit. The Wasp aura is created by the right education, style, social position, genealogy, achievement, wealth, profession, influence or politics.

Thus Roman Catholics like William Buckley, Sargent Shriver and Ted Kennedy are pushed toward Waspdom by their associations, professions and life styles. Though German Jewish, Walter Lippmann is still a Waspirant. His clubs (Metropolitan, Cosmos, River) and his influence on opinion give him undeniable Wasp power. Wall Street Dynasts John Schiff and John Loeb may qualify, if they want, as honorary Wasps.”

Doesn’t this sound awfully familiar? Just as supposedly anybody can be an ‘American’, as long as they claim to believe in certain propositions or ideas, so WASPdom does not mean genetics but simply a way of life.

“The perfect candidate,” wrote Harvard Professors Edward Banfield and James Wilson, “is of Jewish, Polish, Italian or Irish extraction and has the speech, dress, manners and the public virtues—honesty, impartiality and devotion for public interest—of the upper-class Anglo-Saxon.”

Well, if it’s just a state of mind or a style or a social position, why even bother to keep the real WASPs around? They are no longer needed.

Just as an aside, I was thinking just the other day that so often, people aspiring to fame or influence used to Anglicize their names, adopting, almost always, quintessentially WASP names. So how is it possible without investigating someone’s background to know who is truly of WASP descent and who is not? Perhaps that was the idea, to blur the lines. In a way, this is a kind of imposture. Maybe it was meant to work that way, to insinuate one’s way into the establishment, claiming the cachet that once was attached to being old-stock American. Nowadays, of course, I notice there is less of such deception, and people often keep their ethnic names; why not? It pays to be ethnic and ‘diverse’ today, while being WASP is a stigma, according to popular belief.

Might it not be that many of these insinuators, the impostors or ‘Waspirants’ as the article calls them, subtly infiltrated the establishment and spread their ‘new’ ideas, the ‘alien rules’ that have been imposed from without, as Desmond Fennell terms them? Perhaps the WASP inclusiveness, our effort to be fair-minded and to give everybody a chance provided they ‘assimilated’ to our outward norms, was our downfall, just as in a larger sense this has been America’s downfall. It’s possible to be too fair-minded, to the point of assuming goodwill on the part of those who may be only feigning friendship and amity.

The TIME article concludes with this statement:

At his worst, the Wasp has been too repressive and rigid. At his best, he has stood for a certain selflessness, a sense of public service, a disinterestedness in the face of brawling passions. A feeling is growing that in this time of ideological rancor these are qualities worth reviving.”

How ironic. The WASP’s very sense of selflessness, sense of public service, disinterestedness or objectivity, has been used as a weapon against us.

The fate of the vanishing WASP seems to be a microcosm of the fate of Old America, which is fitting, because old America was largely our creation, made in our image. And as we go, so goes Old America.

If anyone reading this thinks that people are ”all the same under the skin” regardless of race, or that we in America, we ”Americans” of every color and creed and race and breed, are all part of one big ‘We’, a rainbow nation, I recommend reading the above-titled, blatantly and breezily anti-White piece from The Atlantic. It is written by a Hua Hsu, and in this piece, White people are written about in the third person, as if absent, and as if Whites are not intended to be part of the discussion. As I’ve said before, Whites are everywhere being written out of the script, except to make an occasional cameo appearance when a stock villain is needed, to be greeted by catcalls and boos.

The piece is off to a fast start; by the fifth paragraph, the writer is slinging loaded words and phrases like the following:

From the hysteria over Eastern European immigration to the vibrant cultural miscegenation of the Harlem Renaissance, it is easy to see how this imagined worldwide white kinship might have seemed imperiled in the 1920s. There’s no better example of the era’s insecurities than the 1923 Supreme Court case United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, in which an Indian American veteran of World War I sought to become a naturalized citizen by proving that he was Caucasian. The Court considered new anthropological studies that expanded the definition of the Caucasian race to include Indians, and the justices even agreed that traces of “Aryan blood” coursed through Thind’s body. But these technicalities availed him little. The Court determined that Thind was not white “in accordance with the understanding of the common man” and therefore could be excluded from the “statutory category” of whiteness. Put another way: Thind was white, in that he was Caucasian and even Aryan. But he was not white in the way Stoddard or Buchanan were white.”
[Emphasis mine]

So already we have Whites being ”hysterical” over Eastern European immigration of the past (and tell me, Mr. Hsu, was that concern you dismiss as ”hysteria” not well-founded? I would say there’s ample proof it was quite justified.) And in the next sentence we read the phrase ”imagined worldwide white [sic] kinship” — by which the writer implies there is no real White kinship. In the next sentence we read of ”insecurities”, that word being the author’s dismissal of the White world’s definitions of who is White, a definition necessitated only by the foolish admission of exotic peoples to America.

The writer goes on to question the definition of Whiteness, suggesting that such a definition is absurd or meaningless or unnecessary:

The ’20s debate over the definition of whiteness—a legal category? a commonsense understanding? a worldwide civilization?—took place in a society gripped by an acute sense of racial paranoia, and it is easy to regard these episodes as evidence of how far we have come.”

There we go again: ‘‘a society gripped by an acute sense of racial paranoia” — Whites are all congenitally crazy, if we are to judge by the loaded terms Hsu uses in describing this issue.

(And by the way, Mr. Hsu: White is easily defined, meaning descended from European ancestors, plain and simple. The nonsense about East Indians being ‘Aryan’ or ‘Caucasian’ is an irrelevant diversion that is still, unfortunately, being employed today. Those last two terms are useless, being apparently inclusive of a number of people from Iranians to Hindus, and a category that includes such disparate people is useless for all intents and purposes.)

I do notice that the phrase ”White America” is in scare quotes, as if to sneer at the very notion that such a thing exists.

The article is a long one, and I don’t propose to take it apart line by line or even idea by idea, fallacy by fallacy. It’s all familiar ground anyway; read one of these multicultists and you’ve read them all.

But I am simply left breathless by the brazenness of it all; the arrogant, triumphalist tone of the piece and most of the people who are quoted or cited in it. The ‘end of White America’ is treated as a fait accompli, a foregone conclusion, an inevitability, and ultimately a Good Thing.

Every such article has to, at some point, use the phrase ”how far we have come“, and as you willl notice, this article does not disappoint; I’ve included the quote in the excerpt above.

The idea is that old America, the original, real America, was a backward, bigoted, ”paranoid”, racist place, and now we have ”come so far” from that odious past to an enlightened present in which we celebrate the ‘beiging of America”, as this article describes.

The author notes that whiteness is a thing of the past, and that America, or what is left of it, is being remade in the image of ”its multicultural heirs”:

Today, the arrival of what Buchanan derided as “Third World America” is all but inevitable. What will the new mainstream of America look like, and what ideas or values might it rally around? What will it mean to be white after “whiteness” no longer defines the mainstream? Will anyone mourn the end of white America? Will anyone try to preserve it?”

The writer asks these questions only rhetorically; he does not care to talk to anyone who might care to preserve White America, nor do any of those quoted seem to mourn anything; they are all, in some way, cashing in on the ‘beiging’ of America, profiting by it, capitalizing on it. Most of those he apparently interviewed are insiders in some form of show business, public relations, advertising, or other such businesses that see dollar signs in the destruction of White America. They all treat the concerns of White Americans as neurotic and baseless, and ultimately irrelevant, of no moment.

The writer quotes Christian Lander, the blogger behind ”Stuff White People Like.”

“Like, I’m aware of all the horrible crimes that my demographic has done in the world,” Lander says. “And there’s a bunch of white people who are desperate—desperate—to say, ‘You know what? My skin’s white, but I’m not one of the white people who’s destroying the world.’”

For Lander, whiteness has become a vacuum. The “white identity” he limns on his blog is predicated on the quest for authenticity—usually other people’s authenticity. “As a white person, you’re just desperate to find something else to grab onto. You’re jealous! Pretty much every white person I grew up with wished they’d grown up in, you know, an ethnic home that gave them a second language. White culture is Family Ties and Led Zeppelin and Guns N’ Roses—like, this is white culture. This is all we have.”

So, for my money, Lander comes across as just another self-hating, deracinated, Gen Y or Millennial young man who knows nothing of his roots or his heritage and cares less. Whiteness is, if it exists at all, an occasion for regret or apology or expiation of guilt, or a subject fit for self-deprecating humor or ridicule. That’s always been the impression I’ve gotten from ‘Stuff White People Like’, whereas some have insisted that he is supposedly some kind of champion of White people, and that he is obviously ‘racially aware.’ Sorry but I see no indication of that. SWPL is not a pro-White blog, nor has Lander ever really represented it as such, though some insist it can be seen that way. I think they are thinking wishfully, or projecting something onto the blog that the blogger never intended. Sometimes being too imaginative is not helpful.

Read the whole article if you must, if you’re a glutton for punishment.
The writer gets in the usual requisite dig against WASPs, alluding to a book called A Privileged Life: Celebrating WASP Style:

…a handsome coffee-table book compiled by Susanna Salk, depicting a world of seersucker blazers, whale pants, and deck shoes. (What the book celebrates is the “inability to be outdone,” and the “self-confidence and security that comes with it,” Salk tells me. “That’s why I call it ‘privilege.’ It’s this privilege of time, of heritage, of being in a place longer than anybody else.”)

I keep asking people: who are these WASPs with all the privilege, the supposed New England elites? Insofar as they exist, they are hardly ”WASP” anymore, often having lost their WASP identity and becoming part of this deracinated cosmopolitan elite. Many of these old-money types who seem to be the subject of books like that are long since intermarried with other ethnic groups that they are not WASP in any meaningful way at all, yet they continue to be held up as examples of Anglo-Saxon villainy.

Incidentally, why would someone named Salk be an insider in this supposed WASP world anyway?

The overall picture presented in this piece is that of a lot of people of once-marginal immigrant stock celebrating the demise of White traditional America. It’s rather like in a novel or a movie in which the rich old uncle is dying and the would-be heirs and hangers-on, legitimate or not, are gathered like vultures waiting for him to hurry and die so they can fight over the spoils and dance on his grave.

But I hope that Mr.(?) Hsu is not counting on his ”adopted” Uncle Whitey expiring too soon; he may just fool you and rally to recovery, when you least expect it. He’s a tough old guy, and so you may not want to start spending your share of his fortune just yet.

Lots of people love this movie of course. But I’m convinced it’s for the wrong reasons. Because to me “It’s a Wonderful Life” is anything but a cheery holiday tale.
[...]
Was this what adulthood promised?

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife.
[...]
I’ve found, after repeated viewings, that the film turns upside down and inside out, and some glaring — and often funny — flaws become apparent. These flaws have somehow deepened my affection for it over the years.

Take the extended sequence in which George Bailey (James Stewart), having repeatedly tried and failed to escape Bedford Falls, N.Y., sees what it would be like had he never been born. The bucolic small town is replaced by a smoky, nightclub-filled, boogie-woogie-driven haven for showgirls and gamblers, who spill raucously out into the crowded sidewalks on Christmas Eve. It’s been renamed Pottersville, after the villainous Mr. Potter, Lionel Barrymore’s scheming financier.

Here’s the thing about Pottersville that struck me when I was 15: It looks like much more fun than stultifying Bedford Falls — the women are hot, the music swings, and the fun times go on all night. If anything, Pottersville captures just the type of excitement George had long been seeking.”
[...]
Gary Kamiya, in a funny story on Salon.com in 2001, rightly pointed out how much fun Pottersville appears to be, and how awful and dull Bedford Falls is. He even noticed that the only entertainment in the real town, glimpsed on the marquee of the movie theater after George emerges from the alternate universe, is “The Bells of St. Mary’s.”

Now that’s scary.

I’ll do Mr. Kamiya one better, though. Not only is Pottersville cooler and more fun than Bedford Falls, it also would have had a much, much stronger future. Think about it: In one scene George helps bring manufacturing to Bedford Falls. But since the era of “It’s a Wonderful Life” manufacturing in upstate New York has suffered terribly.

On the other hand, Pottersville, with its nightclubs and gambling halls, would almost certainly be in much better financial shape today. It might well be thriving.”

Jamieson says that his first viewing of the movie was at age 15, when his high-school teacher showed the film to his class. So, doing the math, it looks as though he would now be 42, but his comments seem to indicate that he is still 15 emotionally. At that age, one thinks that nightlife and pleasure-seeking are the height of glamor and fun. But can one build a satisfying life, and raise a family in a town which depends on human weaknesses and lusts for its sustenance? Man does not live by bread alone, even if vice is lucrative.

The America represented in Frank Capra’s movies, including this one, is an America that is a foreign country to many of the younger generations.

Liberals usually ignore the fact that ”the past is another country.” We cannot judge “another country” by the standards of the country that is post-American America.

The younger generations, sadly, have essentially grown up in the ugly Pottersville of postmodern America. So I suppose it is only natural that someone born in the mid-60s and coming of age in the 80s might sneer at old America, as represented by Bedford Falls, as ‘stultifying’ or boring. Pottersville, with its bright lights, materialism, and raucous pleasure-seeking would be more to the tastes of those brought up in post-60s, urbanized, X-rated, ‘new’ America. It’s what they know; it’s what is celebrated in today’s media.

Jamieson shows how little he understands the motivations or the character of George Bailey when he says that Pottersville represented the ‘excitement’ George Bailey had been seeking, and had missed. I have watched the movie many times, and I don’t read George Bailey that way at all; he wanted travel and adventure, new experiences. But if the ‘bright lights’ and sleazy flash of Pottersville represent the only kind of excitement worth having, why wouldn’t George have simply headed for the nearest center of nightlife and joined the revelry? I understood his desire for excitement to be the excitement of a more wholesome kind: new places, new challenges, a chance to test his wings out in the wider world. The kind of manly adventure that earlier generations of boys often aspired to.

It may be hard for post-Americans to understand that excitement and adventure, let alone happiness, are not to be found in dissipation or thrill-seeking and self-indulgence. But earlier generations knew that. George Bailey, or his real-life counterparts, knew that.

As for the writer’s comment that Pottersville would be ”in better financial shape” than boring old Bedford Falls, is that not the kind of thinking that liberals often attribute to greed-driven capitalist Republicans? The writer’s liberal leanings seem apparent, as he seems to think that George Bailey might better have walked away from his hometown and set off to ”find himself’, sixties-style, or ‘re-invented himself’, unfettered by family bonds, personal obligations and other such old-fashioned concerns. But I suspect he is more likely one of those libertarians who worships ‘free markets’ and individual freedom as the two greatest goods in the world.

I know that many very liberal people truly love this film, and it’s interesting how conservatives and traditionally-minded people see certain things in it, while liberals see other things. Liberals, of course, see the villain, the rather caricatured Mr. Potter, as the symbol of rampant greed which of course is ”conservatism” in their view. George Bailey, though he owns the Savings & Loan, is a liberal ”good guy” because he puts the interests of the working classes and noble immigrants, like the Martini family, first. Bailey is the ”little guy” who is the victim of capitalism, and as such liberals can see him as a sympathetic character and a hero.

On the other hand, conservatives see that the movie presents our traditional Christian Anglo-American ways as good and as the bedrock of our country. I don’t see how liberals and other cynics can fail to see that. It is as though they believe that the George Baileys and the all-American small towns just grew out of nowhere, having no basis in our Western Christian heritage.

The cement that held small-town old America together was our shared Christian values and our Anglo-American idea of neighborliness and civic spirit and plain old decency. Destroy that, and you destroy the potential for the kind of community and wholesome living that was the core of old America.

Somehow liberals are unwilling to see this. They think in terms of class struggle, rich versus poor. Along these lines, is Potter merely a cartoon villain, meant to represent capitalism, as liberals think? No; I think he represents greed and avarice, which may be distortions of the reasonable desire to make a profit. His desire for gain is unchecked by any concern for his fellow man; he is selfish and unprincipled. Capitalism per se is not bad, but it can be, if unmoderated by a concern for others, for neighbors, kith, kin, and community. Potter seems bereft of any such feelings. As such, he is a reprehensible person.

George Bailey, on the other hand, is a basically decent and honest man who nonetheless has his dark side, as we see as his life unravels. He is not a goody-two-shoes or a plaster saint. He is capable of selfishness, self-pity, and anger. But ultimately he is redeemed, and it is his concern for his friends, family, and community that testify to his essential good-heartedness.

Overall, the tone of the movie is uplifting and inspiring, and it leaves us with a hopeful feeling about fallen human nature. It is possible to rise above our own self-centered concerns. It is possible to learn to accept the limitations with which life presents us, and to find the good in whatever situation we find ourselves. We all have to play the hand we are dealt, but on the other hand, we can make choices; we need not be victims of circumstance, embittered by life’s difficulties. We can love and forgive even the flawed people around us, like George’s Uncle Billy.

We can find beauty and fulfillment even in a ”boring” small town like Bedford Falls.
Now, we find ourselves in a world which overall looks very much like Pottersville, and towns like Bedford Falls are becoming harder and harder to find. It is very easy to be cynical and hardened in this postmodern America, as Jamieson shows us by his article.

The post-American, post-Christian generations have a hard time understanding that you can’t undercut the Christian, Anglo-American foundations of this country without destroying the whole edifice, including the things that even liberals recognize as good.

Once you take away our traditional faith and culture, Potter has won; it’s all reduced to money, cheap entertainment, and selfish individualism.

Bedford Falls and the people therein were artifacts of a certain place, time and value system. It’s no accident that as those values fade, as the traditions and the habits of mind fade, so does the particular kind of ‘wonderful life’ celebrated in Capra’s film.

As I’ve said before, it’s possible to be homesick for the old America, even for those who never experienced it. The fact that many young people, even liberal young people, are moved by “It’s a Wonderful Life” shows that perhaps they feel a sense of loss which they fail to recognize.

We might all try to re-create that kind of life in our own individual sphere, but it can’t be done in a vacuum, without a congenial world in which traditional ways are once again acknowledged and preserved.