"Secret Garden" and Multiculti

For some reason yesterday I needed to re-read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. But I couldn't find a copy in the house. So I looked online for the movies. There are many, including the 1993 version with Maggie Smith as the housekeeper Mrs. Medlock. There is a 2020 version with the Yorkshire lad Dickon played by a POC. And there is a "steampunk" 2017 version that turns the whole thing into a post environmental apocalypse.

But the original novel was about the tricky issue of the children of Brits in India. The girl heroine, Mary Lennox, is the child of Brits that died of cholera. Mary knew nothing of her parents, being raised by "native" servants. Mary ends up at her hunchback uncle's place, Misselthwaite Manor, on the Yorkshire moors.

Misselthwaite is a morgue, because the uncle, Mr. Craven (!), is still in a depression over the death of his wife, and ignores his bedridden son. Because. 

The story is about Mary's personal transformation from a spoiled, angry brat into a savior that saves not only herself, but her uncle and his bedridden son, with the help of the servant Martha and her younger brother Dickon, who is a dab hand at pet animals and anything to do with plants. It is, you may say, completely over the top.

In the 2017 steampunk version I watched, -- not mentioned on La Wik until I fix it -- the uncle owns a big factory that has completely run down after an environmental collapse and the death of the scientist mother, and the bedridden son turns out to be AI, invented by the dead scientist mom. It is a hot mess, but a rather charming hot mess.

The 2020 version features a young man of color as the Yorkshire lad, Dickon. And that got me to thinking.

The whole point of The Secret Garden, in my mind, is the cruel treatment of children by the upper class, whether it is powerful folks in the Empire dumping the kids on the servants, while they pursue their lives of power or self-pity.

Then there is the case of Rudyard Kipling, born in India, who was dropped off at a boarding house in Southsea, Sussex, with his sister Trix just before the parents returned India. Rudyard was five, and Trix was three. Kipling called this the "House of Desolation" writes Jad Adams in Kipling:

The children speculated miserably on why they had been abandoned, unable to understand what had led their parents to leave them to such horrors.

I wonder what Kipling meant in The Jungle Book about an abandoned child brought up by wolves.

So, you can see that children's books -- modern fairy tales, I suppose -- are often about the horrible neglect and cruelty often meted out to children, especially the children of the ruling class.

In The Secret Garden the secret ingredient to redeem Mary's humanity is Dickon, the child of nature. In The Jungle Book the redeemers are wolves!

Hey, isn't raciss to cast Dickon, the child of nature, as a child of color in the 2020 movie? Shouldn't the POC have been Mr. Craven the uncle? Oh no, because the POC can't be the villain.

But, to make the problem bigger, how do we, of western culture, invite the outsiders, which really means Africans, into our culture, without being insulting or patronizing?

For instance, was it insulting to have the black slave Mammy in Gone with the Wind? If the movie were reshot, should Mammy be played by a white bitter-clinger?

Was it patronizing to have the physicist astronomer in Interstellar played by a black? Or is it insulting to American-born blacks that the actor was born Ghanaian?

The point is that literature and the arts -- and especially children's stories -- are about stereotypes, recognizable stereotypes that leap out of ordinary life into the story. It must be so. And for the Jungians among us, we translate "stereotypes" into "archetypes."

If you muddy up the archetypes with ruling-class dictates and quotas and such I do not think you will achieve what you think.

And above all, no group will find its place in modern society as the Little Darlings in the petting zoo of the ruling class. Everyone of us, and every group, has to find their own way and their own niche that plays to their particular cultural heritage and acquired skills.

And here's the danger for America's blacks. The recent importation of millions of East and South Asians means that the old moral narrative of evil whites vs. innocent blacks is going to be replaced by a new narrative, probably along the lines of cultured Asians vs. jumped-up Europeans and primitive Africans.

Or it might be a fight between South Asian Brahmins vs. East Asian Mandarins, with blacks the clients of the Brahmins and whites the clients of the Mandarins.

Either way, our literature and our movies need to be peopled by real archetypes, not blurred and fake ones imposed by an unjust ruling class.

Women in the Public Square: Pelosi and AOC

One of my ideas is that women do not understand and do not want to live in the public square. It comes from years of pondering Georg Simmel's dictum about the emergence of women into the public square.

Simmel understood that in the short term the public sphere for women would be defined by the rules “created by men and for men” but that eventually women would transform the public square to suit “a more feminine sensibility.”

But how do you square this with micro-aggressions and "safety culture?" You can't, unless you make the shameful jump to the notion that women do not get the public square that men have created, and do not like life in the public square.

The point about the public square is that it is a place where men can fight each other: not with swords but with words. And a beautiful thing it is: to transform the age-old culture of the fight to the verbal fight of the public square.

But women don't do this. When a woman has a beef with another woman she stops talking to her, probably forever. Women can do this because the vast majority of women are the absolute monarchs of their households. Anthony Trollope understands this in John Caldigate where he has all the women in complicated relations of not-talking-to-each-other.

I think this is the way to understand House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her animadversion to Donald Trump. She is just not willing to have any conversation with Donald Trump. Because? Probably because he insulted her a ways back. Insults: that's what men do to each other as they sort out their hierarchy. But women do not. 

So I regard the impeachments of Donald Trump as a kind of high school Mean Girls campaign. Except, of course, that the Mean Girls never think of themselves as mean, but as the most attractive and chaste and pure girls in school.

And AOC is a naive young woman that believes what she has been carefully taught, as I believe, almost all women do.

What neither of these women understand and what few women understand is what every man in the public square understands: It's All Bullshit!

Men can accept this because of a maxim of mine:

Women expect to be protected; men know they are expendable.

But, you see, if women are to expect to be protected they must go with the program, and that starts with believing and enacting society's main narrative.

So I believe that eventually women will depart the public square; they will realize they have much more power by acting from behind the scenes. The Duke of Wellington, you know, was frequently entertained by in the 1820s by Mrs. Arbuthnot.

How will it happen? Probably it will happen as upper-class women come to decide that careers are not what they are cracked up to be. And so it will come to be accepted, and then insisted, that women who really contribute to society do so as mothers to their children and advisors to their husbands. Oh, and they will be opposed to divorce. Did you know that the divorce rate for college-educated women is 25 percent?

And then middle-class women will copy the upper-class women, and the world will change.

German History in Three Chapters

Thanks to Curtis Yarvin I got to watch a US propaganda film from 1945, warning of the danger of US right-wing politics using the Evil Germans as an example. 

There are three chapters of "German History" in the film:

Chapter 1: Führer #1, Blood and Iron (picture of Bismarck)

Chapter 2: Führer #2, Deutschland Über Alles (picture of Wilhelm II)

Chapter 3: Führer #3, Today Germany... Tomorrow the World (picture of Adolf Hitler)

Then, after pictures of mass graves, a swastika getting blown up, and the wreck of Hitler's Alpine retreat, we switch to the US of 1945 and "The ghosts of Berchtesgarten still walk. Right here in America..." and pictures of American politicians and activists that we are supposed to hate. Only I don't know who they are picturing. Presumably one of them is Charles Lindbergh. And another is Huey Long. And presumably Father Coughlin. But I can't be sure.

Bless their hearts.

When you know a bit of history it is interesting to see what the propagandists miss out. For instance, the whole point of Bismark's three wars, on Denmark, Austria, and France, was to force the various German states to unite. Bismark's genius was to understand that the only way to do this was with three nice little wars.

And why bother to unite Germany? Well, perhaps because of what had happened to the German lands before the film's Year Zero of 1870.

We could discuss the occupation of the German lands by France in the Napoleonic Wars. Friedrich Meinecke's book is called "The Age of German Liberation: 1795-1815." A lot of what we call German nationalism was born in that age when the Germans got together to decide how to stop the French from walking all over them every century or so.

Because in 1618-1648 was the Thirty Years War in which Sweden, France, and the Spanish/Austrian Hapsburgs pretty well devastated Germany. Thanks fellahs!

So if I were to write a History of Germany in three chapters, I would say

Chapter 1: Never Again. Leading intellectual lights in German lands during the Napoleonic Wars devise educational reforms to educate Germans to stand up against the French. The University of Berlin is the first research university. It leads eventually to Bismarck, who cunningly unites Germany in three short sharp wars.

Chapter 2: Age of the Idiots. After the fall of Bismarck Germany is ruled by the lightweight Wilhelm II, who makes enemies of France, Britain and Russia, while Germans invent the automobile, make a revolution in physics, and a revolution in ammonia fertilizer with the Haber process. After getting caught in a two-front war Germany -- Idiot! -- was humiliated and dismembered by the Treaty of Versailles, and that made young Adolf Hitler mad. So when the stumbling bumbling US Federal Reserve failed to act as lender of last resort in the 1929 crash Hitler rose to power, and then got Germany into another two-front war. Idiot!

Chapter 3: European Hegemony. Dismembered and humiliated again after World War II, Germany got smart and entered into a partnership with France to dominate Europe with the nominally supra-national European Union. So today Germany dominates Europe but does it through intermediaries. Sorry about the butcher's bill in the Age of the Idiots.

That's the thing about history. The more you know, the more you can stitch together a narrative to do anything you want. You can make the Germans the monsters of all time, or you can make them the helpless victims that finally got their act together. 

Your choice.

AntiFa Doesn't Want Powell's to Sell Anti-AntiFa Book

 I like to say that our liberal friends have No Idea. They've been patting themselves on the back for generations about their commitment to free speech, and all the liberal ladies at the public library do their Banned Books thingy every year and think they are incredibly brave.

But now Powell's Books, the independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, is under fire from AntiFa for daring to sell Andy Ngo's book on AntiFa: Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.

Of course, Powells isn't actually going to sell Unmasked in its store. Heavens No! Darling!

At Powell’s, a lot of our inventory is hand-selected, and hand-promoted. And a lot of our inventory is not. With several million titles available online at any given moment, complete hand-curation is not possible. Unmasked by Andy Ngo came to us through an automatic data feed via one of our long-term and respected publishers, Hachette Book Group. We list the majority of their catalogue automatically, as do many other independent and larger retailers. We have a similar arrangement with other publishers.

This book will not be on our store shelves, and we will not promote it. That said, it will remain in our online catalogue. We carry books that we find anywhere from simply distasteful or badly written, to execrable, as well as those that we treasure. We believe it is the work of bookselling to do so.

Decades ago we received credible bomb threats for selling the work of Salman Rushdie, and yet we carried on. We cannot behave any differently today when we feel differently about the book or writer in question.

As reported by Oregon Live: "Powell’s responds to protests over right-wing agitator Andy Ngo’s book: ‘We carry a lot of books we find abhorrent’" See, AntiFa has been doing mostly peaceful protests inside Powell's Books lately and Powell's has been closing early.

Actually, I feel for Powell's. There they are, just north of downtown Portland in the Rose District in a store that occupies a whole block. Whaddya going to do when AntiFa calls and the Portland City Council is busy defunding the police and the mayor is Ted Wheeler? Send for the Proud Boys? 

This could be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Because I doubt that a bookstore can afford to occupy a whole block in Portland's Rose District. Not any more.

And you think that all those hipster lefties in Portland are going to continue buying at a store that sells -- online! -- a vile right-wing agitator's screed about the mostly peaceful protesters of BLM and AntiFa?

It's all very sad. I've loved to visit Powell's for over 40 years, since I started driving down to Ashland's Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1978. We met my parents in Ashland for a week and went to three plays. So that when my daughters grew up the elder one started taking her kids to Ashland every year. On the way down, and on the way back: the guilty pleasure of a visit to Powell's.

I'm afraid to tell you that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is not what it was. It was created by a high-school teacher in the 1930s, but now it is overrun with Wokeyness. There have to be opposite gender characters in pretty well every performance, and sometimes even in the main characters. For instance, we were to a Henry IV Part One with the Harry Percy played by a woman in tight camo with a big butt. Then there was the Julius Caesar with Caesar as a woman CEO.

When you do stuff like that you are advertising to the world that you have Literally No Clue.

But back to Powell's. The point about Powell's is that, when you check out a particular section, you find books you didn't know existed. That is perfectly wonderful. And in its psychology section there is a whole display bookcase exclusively devoted to Freud and Jung -- with Jung taking up 2/3 of the shelf space.

Only question is: how much longer?

I'd rather not think about that.

Zuck and @jack Have No Power, Because...

So now Curtis Yarvin has exploded another test nuclear device. "Big tech has no power at all," says he.

What does he mean? He means that, for Zuckerberg and the rest of the tech lords, the easy way out is to defer to the "press" and cancel anyone the press wants canceled. 

Zuck doesn’t want to do any of this. Nor do his users particularly want it. Rather, he is doing it because he is under pressure from the press. Duh.

Perfectly true. Only, I would add, the Breitbart Downstream Principle applies:

The press is downstream from activism is downstream from the Cathedral is downstream from the political formula.

For "activism" you can substitute "wokies" if you prefer.

The maxim above is merely a restatement of the Breibart Extended Downstream Principle I have inscribed among my Maxims:

Politics is downstream from culture (Breitbart) is downstream from religion (Wright) is downstream from “the meaning of life, the universe, and everything” (Chantrill). 

For those of you that aren't yet in the know, the Cathedral is the combination of all the people who are good and right and that have the right values.

Its inner circle, the Brain and the Voice, includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class. Its funding division, the Foundation, is the whole upper economic class. Its teaching division, the School, gets to indoctrinate almost everyone for over a decade. And its doctrine, the Dream, defines good and evil for all decent people.

To clarify things further, Yarvin argues that: 

There are three forms of regime: monarchy (rule of one), oligarchy (rule of a minority), and democracy (rule of a majority). The System is an oligarchy.

There are four forms of oligarchy: hereditary oligarchy (rule of nobles), military oligarchy (rule of soldiers), commercial oligarchy (rule of the wealthy), and clerical oligarchy (rule of thinkers). The System is a clerical oligarchy.

The Political Formula is the ruling class's moral and legal basis for its power. I described the political formula of our ruling class today at American Thinker.

The U.S. formula used to be that government existed to protect “the little guy.” The formula was celebrated in anthems like It’s a Wonderful Life, with the little guy homeowners of Bailey Park protected by St. George Bailey from the rapacious dragon Mr. Potter.

In our day government exists to fight systemic racism, and it is celebrated in anthems like the woke “oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors” narrative. If it weren’t for the “allies,” little kiddies are carefully taught from K thru Activism School, the world would collapse into a “literally Hitler” oppression of the oppressed peoples by the white oppressors. Sign here to become an “ally.”

Am I right, or am I right?

And what is poor old Zuck going to do standing up against the priests of the Cathedral and against the sacred principles decreed in the regime's political formula? He's gonna stand up against all that is good and true and anti-racist? He ain't, and neither is @jack at Twitter. 

So what do we do about it? Well, the answer is right there in my Downstream maxim. We gotta come up with a new "meaning of life, the universe, and everything." Which, of course, I have done in my "Vision of the Good Life."

So, what are we waiting for?

Direct Censorship, Reign of Terror

So, we've officially entered the Woke Reign of Terror, where you are not allowed to disagree with the regime. Curtis Yarvin:

As a student of history, I know what burden the System has taken on by this step. Such an escalation is a ratchet. Once you enter the mindset of the Eastern bloc and declare the revolution as a permanent axiom, which makes anyone who opposes or even doubts the revolution into a potentially violent criminal, there is no way back.

This "mode of direct censorship... works." But there is a problem. It takes a lot of energy. You gotta have your two minutes hate every day. Of course, you have to amp it up, as the French did, and the Bolsheviks did. The Jacobins guillotined their tens of thousands, the Bolsheviks executed and starved their tens of millions. And then the whole thing dies of exhaustion. I suppose that our Wok-eviks will just deplatform the top conservatives and Qanon guys and get thousands named and shamed and fired. And then one day it will die. Because, as Crane Brinton says in Anatomy of Revolution, people cannot live forever in the fever of revolution. And then comes the Thermidorean Reaction.

Because, you see, any regime that has to break the glass and go for direct censorship has admitted that their revolution has already failed. If things were really copacetic, and heaven on Earth were just around the corner, the regime wouldn't need censorship. The facts would speak for themselves with just a little nudge from regime supporters.

The whole thing also reminds us -- as if we need telling -- that the regime is actually scared of the Trump voters and the Commoners in general. Which means that, deep down, they know instinctively that they have visited monstrous injustice on the ordinary Commoners of America.

For the truth is that the Commoners, like the bourgeoisie, are not that interested in power. They just want to get on with their lives. Only, as Trotsky said, "you may not be interested in power, but power is interested in you." 

Now I would say that this is new. Back in the agricultural age there were more like just two classes: the landlords and the peasants; landlords had the power and peasants sucked up to power. The idea of people just going about their business, trusting trustworthy people, is new and revolutionary and utterly confusing to the people interested in power.

The question for our time is whether the Commoners that are not that interested in power can ever get a ruling class that respects them and lets them get on with their lives.

We know at least that the current ruling class down not respect us, and is damned if it will let us just live our lives in peace.

Democrats Shocked: Blair Kid to Intern with GOP

When Tony Blair’s kid Euan decided to try for an internship with Congress, where do you think he applied?
Like any ambitious kid, he applied to the “powerful” House Rules Committee. But why oh why
did the chip off the old New Labour block sign up with the eevil Republican majority committee staff?
Apparently the news has “stunned Democrats in Washington.”

But don’’t worry Dems.
Young Euan
is planning a stint on your side of the aisle in due course, before
he goes on to get an MBA at Harvard. Pop quiz. Who was the first US president to get an MBA from Harvard?