Jack Donovan

For a long time, Left-leaning satirists and comedians have owned funny. Credit it to nepotism or closed doors, but the best humor you could hope for Right-of-center was the occasional libertarian toker or cartoonish redneck self-parody. Blogger Jonathan Chait congratulated the Left for their mastery of satire in a post for The New Republic only a few months ago.

The Left cheered for new media and the end of gatekeepers, but it was their own women (and men) were stationed at the gates.

The old Right always seemed to be made up of cranky, carb-faced old men. The new Right is fast, young and far handier with Photoshop.

After an Ohio University student group called Students Teaching Against Racism in Society was cheered on by the media for creating fussy, humorless thought policing posters for its pet minority groups, Youth for Western Civilization fired back with some “gotcha” tit for tat that were right on the money.

The cultures that the anti-racists chose to solemnly protect (suicide bomber culture?) were so selective that it was downright racist. The Right was right.

Either it’s OK to make fun of someone else’s culture or it’s not.

Passionate advocate for hillbilly rights Jim Goad spoke truth to power with his own poster.

My pal Kevin I. Slaughter fired up his cosmic joy buzzer and came up with this zinger for the Church of Satan.

Now it seems like everyone is having a laugh at the expense of the uptight  Left.

A Facebook page for the comedy just started up, and there are already Klingons, self-rightous dinosaurs, and offended Klansmen.

And the Internet wouldn’t be the Internet without some unamused cat posters and cute dog posters.

There have also been a ton of great parodies of the “we are the 99%” meme, associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement. My favorite is the cookie monster.

Right now, the Right spends a lot of time doing self-analysis. I guess that’s what you do when you’re on the outside, trying to find your footing. What the Right needs now is more funny. The Left is becoming increasingly hysterical and absurd. Its narratives are as tired and irrelevant as those of any tone deaf, tuned out old coot who holds out hope for a return to Mayberry.

The Left deserves to get trolled, and trolled hard.

Not to fix it, but to help it fall apart.

MoveOn.org President Eli Pariser recently gave a TED talk based on his book, The Filter Bubble.

Pariser has discovered that search engines, social networks and various content providers are filtering out news and ideas that may not appeal to us, based on our individual search histories. This is happening and it is not making us more “well rounded.”

Interestingly, Pariser is concerned that partly because we are becoming more isolated within these “filter bubbles” of friendly data, we are losing our sense of national identity, our sense of civic responsibility and our connection to each other. We only see the kind of information we “like,” and we aren’t likely to be challenged. He says we’re back in the early 20th century again, back when newspapers were the gatekeepers of information and they slanted the news as they saw fit.

For a moment, somewhere in the mid-20th, journalists appointed themselves as guardians of Truth and Objectivity—but they were never truly objective. Who ever is?

Pariser appeals naively to Google and other companies to engineer a new kind of “journalistic integrity” into their search engines, for the national good. The problem is that these massive companies have a global clientele, with global interests. They are not rooted in blood or soil or culture. Globocorp’s sole responsibility is to its bottom line, and it must follow profit wherever it may lead. A company like IKEA, Panasonic, or Coca-Cola takes an interest in many, many nations, and is loyal to no people or place. Corporations make calculated gestures when necessary, but Pariser is not appealing to a Hearst, he’s appealing to an international legal machine.

In lieu of corporate benevolence, Pariser offers 10 ways for concerned readers to control their filter bubbles. Most people won’t bother. Most people simply don’t care. As Mark Zuckerberg said, “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”

Pariser mentioned in passing that the Internet’s “founding mythology” promised a world of people who were more connected to one another, but he complained that this hasn’t actually happened.  It hasn’t happened because that’s only what people publicly say they want. What they privately, or subconsciously, desire is what these companies are giving them: new ways to separate themselves from others and form competing identity groups. Marketing people are better psychologists than psychologists.

Like Patrick Bateman, people say they care about “ending hunger” and genocide and so forth, but they don’t really care about people dying in Africa. Not in any personal, emotionally connected way. The concern they express is a social affectation. If Robin Dunbar is to be believed, we can’t care about people in Africa. Not really. It’s been found that, even on Facebook, most of us can only maintain a meaningful friendship with 150 or so people. Everyone else is a virtual friend—or a virtual stranger. Our brains are wired for small communities, not “one world tribe.”

We seek out ways to create in-groups and out-groups. Sometimes we do this playfully, as with sporting rivalries, though it is not unusual for sports fans to become violent or angry on behalf of their teams. Often we do it politically, ideologically, socially, racially, nationally. We form philosophical cliques and movements. East coast vs. West coast, South side vs. North side, Greeks vs.Trojans, boys against the girls, Democrats vs. Republicans, MoveOn vs. The Tea Party, Christians vs. Muslims vs. Jews, hip-hop vs. punk rock vs. emo, dog lovers vs. cat lovers, Ford vs. Chevy, and Mac vs. PC.

Online social networks have also created a pathway for otherwise average people to separate themselves from the social norms of their geographical location. The chubby check-out girl with the dark eyeliner at a Midwestern Wal-Mart is a Wiccan priestess by night. The guy stocking shoes is “kind of a big deal” on a video game message board. The Mexican buying wife-beaters is an illegal immigrant who “likes” La Raza on Facebook. The guy buying bullets is in a militia, or at least he wants to be. The couple buying soda might be furries.  

The growth of the Internet has given heterodox ideologies a far bigger platform than a soap box, and it has spared the haranguing man a face full of rotten tomatoes—and a punch in the nose.

People want to feel different and special, but they also want to feel embattled. They want a compelling conflict narrative that gives their lives meaning, whether they are standing up for the “oppressed” or standing against the tide of unwanted change. Few want what Pariser called a “balanced diet” of information. They may not want junk food, but they know what they “like.” And they know what they “dislike.” They know who and what they want to “hide.”

It’s not just companies who create filter bubbles. We create them ourselves. We pick sides, we exclude, and we do it on purpose.

We choose to read news that appeals to our interests, caters to our biases and reaffirms our sense of group belonging. The carefully pruned newsfeed can become a self-reinforcing reality. A recent Fast Company article called it the “Balkanization of information.” Most of us want to hear voices that “sound very much like our own.” We want to hear the refrains, we want to recite The Law. (Are we not men?) When we venture outside our tribal bubbles on patrol, we don’t go to learn—like chimpanzees, we look for weak, easy targets to pick off. No one on the far right reads The Huffington Post to learn. People on the far left don’t read Alternative Right to understand.  

The “uniters” of the world wring their hands because they think this divisiveness is dangerous. They’re right. It is dangerous. They think it robs us of our “humanity.” I disagree. I say it reveals our humanity. It reveals what we are and what we have always been—competing contingents of naked apes with interests of our own.

The mechanized slaughter of the world wars and the advent of the atomic age inspired the hymns of multiculturalists who believed that we could all live together as noble savages in peace and harmony. We sung the hymns, but nothing happened. It’s the same as it ever was. Multiculturalism has failed.

The future is tribal. The time has come to start choosing sides again. And with our allies, far and wide, we will live in our information bubbles, and we will bump against others who are living in theirs.

What is culture, anyway, if not a tribal bubble?

Robert N. Taylor has played an active and influential role on the outsider Right for decades. In the 1960s, he was closely involved with “The Minutemen,” a grassroots anti-communist group headed by Robert Bolivar DePugh. Due to a variety of factors, including pressure from the FBI and other organizations, the paramilitary group widely known for its “Traitors Beware!” stickers eventually disbanded; but a template for many future militia groups had been formed. After leaving The Minutemen, Taylor turned to other interests and founded the first incarnation of his folk band Changes with cousin Nicholas Tesluk.  In the ‘70s, Taylor helped pioneer the growing Odinist/ Ásatrú movement and remains involved with various organizations. In the late ‘90s, Michael Moynihan—an editor of the radical traditionalist journal TYR –rediscovered Changes and worked to release old and new material by the duo. Taylor continues to record and tour.
 

Some years ago I remember being introduced to you briefly and then hanging around during a group discussion on the street outside of Optic Nerve Arts in Portland. The topic turned to ritual and coming of age and manhood. You spoke about raising your own son and shared a moving story about how you helped him make the transition from boyhood to manhood through a heathen rite. If I recall correctly, it involved a shield. That was probably one of my first exposures to anyone who actually practiced Ásatrú in a meaningful way, and I was wondering if you could recount the story of that ritual for readers of Alternative Right.

Robert Taylor: It was the opening night of Optic Nerve's Heathen Art Show, and the following night Changes did a performance at a local Irish pub there. The incident I was describing to you occurred at an Althing of the Ásatrú Alliance (of which I was one of the founders and was for a long time a member and supporter). It was a rite of passage into manhood for my older son, Thor. He had turned 16 years old about a month previous to the event. The physical nature of the event is that we formed a large circle. About 82 Ásatrúars were present who composed the circle. On one side of the Circle stood my former wife Karen with my son Thor before her. I stood directly across from them in the circle. Karen was carrying a round Viking style shield made of steel and suede leather. She handed the shield to Thor with an admonition similar to the following:

Here, take this shield and carry it bravely. Never return from battle without it in your hand, or lying on it.

(In other words, come back victorious or dead; don't toss your shield aside so that you can run away faster from the battle.)

Then, with force of her front arms, she pushed Thor into the circle, telling him to go stand with his father and be a man. Thor was visibly surprised by her move and walked across the center of the circle and came by my side. I gifted him a spear telling him to bare it with honor in defense of family and folk. Simple as the rite was, I could see tears brimming on the eyes of many of those in attendance. It resonated with all there, including (most importantly) Thor. From that day onward he never asked for anything from my wife or me. He worked summers to save to purchase his pickup truck and paid his own gas and insurance. And so he was to be right up until the present. He spent four and a half years in the U.S. Military, with a tour of duty in Iraq and is now attending a university, has his own home and is expecting his first child later this year. He recently turned 30 years old. As a father I had no real problems with him. Since he is grown I can praise his attributes. He is industrious, truthful and brave by nature. He has excellent carpentry and building skills, is a good auto and motorcycle mechanic, and lives a clean life and stays in tip-top physical condition. Perhaps he would have been no different minus the rite we did that day. Perhaps all of his virtues are innate, but I myself feel the rite drew a demarcation line between childhood and adulthood in no uncertain terms. The rite we conducted was fashioned from similar rites of passage employed among the Spartans but is perfect for any warrior religion, for that matter.

As I was reading through The Iliad recently, I was particularly struck by the pettiness and the fickleness of the Gods. The surprising thing about the eternal Gods is how easily they get caught up in the moment. They become emotionally involved in human affairs to pass the time -- like couch potatoes sucked into reality television. The Olympians have their own favorites, their own biases, their own loyalties, their own alliances, their own tastes and prejudices.   They have some sort of plan, or at least Zeus seems to -- but even he could just be shooting from the hip. As the skyfather’s plan unfolds, the deathless ones squabble with one another and meddle playfully in mortal dramas. The Gods favor one side for a while, and then just when that side thinks they have things wrapped up, the gods turn on them and favor the other side for a while. Eventually, they just get bored, pick a winner, change the channel on the Universal Remote and move on to another show.
So, too, The Gods of Science.

They want us to believe that they are above it all, that they are cold and objective, that they are guided only by the light of Unbending Truth -- an analog to Fate.  But they’re not. Those who gaze down on the world from Universities have their own favorites, their own biases, their own loyalties, their own alliances, their own tastes and prejudices.  They’re caught up in the moment, too. Their Unbending Truth of today gives way to their Updated Unbending Truth of tomorrow, but we mere mortals cannot question or stand against them. They know things, they assure us, that we men of clay cannot possibly grasp.
I was reminded of the changeable nature of The Gods of Science recently when The Scientific American asked, “Is the Out of Africa Theory Out?”

All the ancestors of contemporary Europeans apparently did not migrate out of Africa as previously believed. According to a new analysis of more than 5,000 teeth from long-perished members of the genus Homo and the closely related Australopithecus, many early settlers hailed from Asia.

We live in amusing times when The Scientific American appears to confirm, suddenly, that we are not all Africans.

What is not so amusing is how many students have been taught the “Out of Africa” theory as if it were Unbending Truth, when it turns out it was just yesterday’s Unbending Truth. How many young minds were influenced by this idea? How many worldviews did this Truth of yesterday subtly -- or dramatically -- alter? How many of these students became adults and went out into the world, making decisions and even influencing public policy based on a theory that may now be regarded as a falsehood?
This is only one example.

Young people today have been programmed to “Rage Against the Machine.” The Left has successfully marketed youthful rebellion against “The Man” for decades. One has to wonder, though, how long it will take until today’s budding hipsters -- gussied up in a postmodern hodgepodge of recycled rebellions past -- finally realize that they are the new squares.

“The Man” is now a smooth-talking, b-ball playin’ brother who come up from bein’ a community organizer in the ghetto.  He wants to save the planet, offer healthcare to everyone, punish the greedy, redistribute wealth, and offer a welcoming hand to his working-class Brown brothers from the south. He’s surrounded himself with a rainbow coalition of the choicest minorities.

It’s got to be tough to make it as a real radical lefty these days. You really have to do your research and get out your microscope to find your microaggressions.  You have to go so far left that it feels almost tongue in cheek and goofy, like that awkwardly ironic t-shirt you bought at Urban Outfitters. You have to hold an anti-plastic bag drum circle. It’s not like back in the ‘60s when you could just grow your hair out, get naked and sit around singing and smoking pot in the mud.  And it’s not some wizened old beatnik feeding you communist propaganda; it’s your schoolteacher, your principal, your college professor and your Supreme Court Justices. The future is now, cats, and you can’t fight “The Man” when he’s on your side. You can take to the streets and march, if that’s what you’re into, but your signs might as well say “Yes, sir, more of the same, please!” All you can do is become part of the machine, another cog. Your “rage” is all staged.

In a variation on a current meme for The Baltimore Sun, Andrew L. Yarrow writes:

Thanks to a long-sour economy and radically changed gender roles and expectations, American masculinity has fractured into an "Up in the Air" male and a down-in-the-dumps male. On the one hand, the corporate masculinity of the early 21st century is based largely on a soft power conveyed by money, prestige and education and their corollaries in grooming, clothing and elan. These mostly urban, upper-middle class (to rich) men read their Economists, know their pinot noirs, and speak in politically correct, complete sentences. Working-class, poor, and much middle-class masculinity is defined by declining fortunes and capabilities in school and the labor force (and even the marriage market), feeding gender- and class-based anger. The "angry white man" losers of Bruce Springsteen ballads often react with a politically conservative hypermasculinity, replete with authoritarian and homophobic streaks.[...]

We need to create the conditions and the role models so that one category of men isn't arrogant and entitled while another is angry and defeated. Multiple masculine identities are OK, but they can't be ever more molded by an economy of glamorous star running backs and benched, injured second-stringers.

And yet, like Hanna Rosin and others, he can offer no real suggestions as to how we might transform masculinity thus. What sort of second-string, less triumphant, noticeably weaker and obviously less impressive masculine ideal will allow our hearty but aimless working class men to feel good about themselves again? No one can really say, but everyone is certain that average men had better hurry up and get over themselves and stop wanting to be men in the way that their ancestors have always been men since the beginning of recorded history.

One good question to ask when someone like Yarrow asserts the “need to create the conditions and the role models so that one category of men isn't arrogant and entitled while another is angry and defeated” is: or else what? 

We need to do this, or else what?

What happens when a huge portion of the male population feels increasingly angry, defeated, dishonored and desperate?

Ask history.

Andrew Brown at The Guardian recently suggested that folks overstate things when they call church leaders and others “misogynists” for refusing to allow female clergy and so forth. Misogyny, much like the word “racism,” is almost always meant to be an accusation of backwards irrationality and hatred.  The dictionary definition, “hatred, dislike, or mistrust of women,” leaves a wide enough berth that almost any reasonable preference for men over women in any situation could be regarded as misogyny. However, there is a huge range between a level-headed concern about the abilities or motivations of a group of people and “hatred” for them. Self-proclaimed feminists, like Amazonian Al Sharptons, frequently leverage the hateful, oppressive and presumably violent connotations of the word misogyny to back their opponents into a corner where all they can do is mutter something apologetic like, “umm…that’s not exactly what I meant to say.”

From the New York Times...

Is Jousting the Next Extreme Sport?

The problem is that Andrews and Adams joust in a style they call “full contact,” which, while popular in North America, is considered by the rest of the world to be unnecessarily dangerous. It’s a reputation that isn’t helped by the video on YouTube showing the two men describing their many injuries, including the time a lance bruised Andrews’s heart and he nearly died from a pulmonary embolism. (He was back jousting five days after his release from the hospital.)

...

North American- and European-style jousters can spend all day criticizing one another’s style of competition, and they frequently do. The “full contact” jousters find the I.J.L. style froufrou and weak, dismissing their combat as “a sorority pillow fight.” I.J.L. jousters, for their part, portray the full-contact jousters as a bunch of ego-driven braggarts who have substituted brute force for safety, elegance and finesse. They dismiss the Americans’ lumberyard lances as “closet poles,” their armor as looking “like a trash can” and their draft horses as “tractors with four legs.” (Both Hedgecock and the Europeans use swifter draft crosses rather than the full-blooded drafts used by American jousters.)

...

“The sport of jousting is only going to survive in the United States if there is that ferocity in it,” Adams says. “If it’s just a bunch of guys hitting each other with balsa-wood lances, the only people going will be the Renaissance crowd.”

Lurking under the surface of the debate over jousting styles are deeper questions about masculinity itself. “American culture is a certain way,” Nowrick says. “The hubris and the braggadocio about how tough I am, the whole Rocky Balboa thing. But when you go to Europe, there’s a different yardstick by which men are measured.”

And in related news...

Historians locate King Arthur's Round Table

Legend has it that his Knights would gather before battle at a round table where they would receive instructions from their King.

But rather than it being a piece of furniture, historians believe it would have been a vast wood and stone structure which would have allowed more than 1,000 of his followers to gather.

Historians believe regional noblemen would have sat in the front row of a circular meeting place, with lower ranked subjects on stone benches grouped around the outside.

In storytelling, artifice and theater are evocative and necessary. In the best case, dramatic storytelling can lift us from the detritus of our mundane little anthills to another realm where we can imagine the pure forms and great ideas that inspire and impart deep wisdom and meaning.

The tragedy of the “post-modern” world of images is that for so many, artifice and theatrical drama have eclipsed the real. In this world of appearances and poses, every costume is disposable and the person is a mere actor, a blank slate, a ravenously hungry, ever- emptying digestive tract that grinds everything into waste.

For the commercial multiculturalist, culture is a folk hat and gender is a pose or “attitude.”  Everything is à la carte. Urban lumberjacks, land-locked surfers and cul-de-sac hip hop. Rabbi chic. Eskimo. Islam. Ferrari. Blue Steel. The ideals that once guided the lives of men are reduced to oily residues that one can splash on and wash off according to mood or occasion. There is no true commitment for the everyday actor, the Homo Californicus. There is only desire and sensation and social approval.

I was walking through a mall yesterday. Malls are always a deluge of stupid, but a window display for this caught my eye.

Why not Eau de “Christianity?”

“Virginity” parfum?

"Allahu Akbar!" an explosive new body spray from AXE?

In a way, it’s all fairly harmless.

But it also struck me as highly symbolic of the marriage of convenience between commercial values and multicultural relativism. Someone can blend together a few essences that smell nice, and then sacralize their fragrance product by giving it a name associated with an idea so powerful that millions of men have died seeking or protecting it. Now, without going to all the trouble, young suburban metrosexuals can squirt themselves with a little “honor” and head out for a night at "da club" with a vague sense of attachment to something beautiful and meaningful. A vague sense of being the kind of man who would stand his ground, protect his reputation, who would fight for a cause or to protect his people.

One of the private challenges for any sort of radical traditionalist seems to be wresting meaning back from the marketplace that degrades it.  

Postmodern consumerism is passive and easy.

Sincerity is subversive.

…and as they increase in years, so they increase in prowess and in skill in the art of arms for peace and for war. And they themselves, through their great zeal and determination, learn the true way to practice the military arts until they, on every occasion, know how to strive toward the most honorable course of action, whether in relation to deeds of arms or in relation to other forms of behavior appropriate to their rank. Then they reflect on, inform themselves, and inquire how to conduct themselves most honorably in all circumstances. They do this quickly and gladly, without waiting for admonitions or exhortations.

 

-- Geoffroi de Charny, The Book of Chivalry

The first part of this piece, here, discussed Hanna Rosin's recent piece for The Atlantic, titled "The End of Men."

Part II: Shop Class as Soulcraft, "Idiot Work" and Other Observations

We are pre-occupied with demographic variables, on the one hand, and sorting into cognitive classes, on the other. Both collapse the human qualities into a narrow set of categories, the better to be represented on a checklist or a set of test scores. This simplification serves various institutional purposes. Fitting ourselves to them, we come to understand ourselves in the light of the available metrics, and forget that institutional purposes are not our own.

-- Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft

As a young man, Matthew B. Crawford developed an interest in repairing automobiles and motorcycles. The son of a physicist, he found that there was a difference between his father’s abstract, theoretical understanding of things and the tacit, real-world knowledge of the experienced gearheads he bumped elbows with at the shop. He worked his way though parts of college as an electrician, and found the work to be both satisfying and mentally engaging.

After picking up a Master’s Degree in Philosophy, he took his place as a “knowledge worker,” writing abstracts-by-formula for a company that indexed scholarly articles. His more esteemed job paid less, and was somehow less mentally engaging. The work lacked integrity, because in his words, it “could not be animated by the goods that were intrinsic to it.” His company produced products (abstracts), but the company was owned by a media conglomerate, and those products were merely a set of numbers in that company’s portfolio of holdings. The quality of the abstract itself didn’t matter; it didn’t really even matter if he understood what he was writing about, and the quantity of abstracts demanded guaranteed that even a smart guy like Crawford could never really be invested in what he was doing. It was busy work, and it encouraged a kind of lackadaisical attitude among his co-workers. One fellow confessed to him that he was doing heroin on the job.

Crawford eventually went back to school and earned a Ph.D. in the history of political thought. He took a high paying job at a Washington, D.C. think tank, and was tasked with coming up with scholarly-sounding arguments that “put a scientific cover on positions arrived at otherwise.” Any honest person with a substantial vocabulary and an aptitude for fancy writing will tell you that it is easier to come up with dazzling bullshit than it is to actually think. (See also: “the art world”)

After five months at the think tank, Crawford quit and opened up his own motorcycle repair shop. An education in the “liberal” arts didn’t lead to anything as freeing as being a man who is directly accountable for the quality of his own work, solving the kinds of problems that can’t simply be talked away. A motorcycle either runs properly or it doesn’t. You end up with the satisfaction of actually having fixed something and the feeling that you earned your fee, or you to take responsibility for your inability to fix it and make it right with the customer.

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

In Shop Class as Soulcraft, Crawford shows how work, beginning with manufacturing work but extending to today’s “knowledge work,” has been degraded by a separation between thinking and doing. He offers the example of a nineteenth century wheelwright, whose craft demanded that he know how to select trees and when to fell them, and whose skillfulness and ingenuity was tested by the unique characteristics of each piece of wood. The work was holistic; as he did the work, he had to think about the end product. There was a sense of individual agency in the work, and each wheel he completed was proof of the quality of his labor -- something he could be proud of. However, when the individual craftsman was replaced by factory assembly line, the work could no longer be holistic. The work of one man was separated into processes to be performed by many men, interchangeably. A series of steps that were once challenging and engaging became repetitive drudgery, the performance of a process. The expert, personal, tacit knowledge of the craftsman was replaced, often inadequately, by the documentation of his “process,” and the understanding of the whole was concentrated into the hands of a few who in most cases didn’t actually do the work and understood it only in the abstract. The systemizing of work into process has become the norm, and it applies to white collar work as well.