The Corpse of British Nationalism
An old woman stumbles into the shop of an Asian grocer and peers quizzically at the price of milk. Indian music blares from the speakers as a large African smirks with the usual blend of contempt and hostility at the white slag fumbling with her pence at the counter. She shuffles home through the dirty streets, passing dull-eyed denizens of the metropolis, and complains to her husband about rising prices as they sit to a modest breakfast. Only after another woman enters the kitchen do we discover that Lady Thatcher is talking to herself, a prisoner in her own home and of her own memories. Like Britain herself, she has been buried alive.
The Iron Lady is a film about the ghosts of people, issues, and a nation long since vanished. It has little to do with Margaret Thatcher's accomplishments, beliefs, or time in office. Instead, most of the movie is spent watching an old demented woman scurry about her modest quarters in conversation with the shade of her dead husband. Occasionally, it shifts from clumsily executed biopic to outright horror. In one particularly disturbing scene, Lady Thatcher frantically turns on all the appliances in her house to drown out the hectoring of her dead husband. Denis Thatcher stares at his wife's back from within a mirror, as Lady Thatcher desperately pleads with herself to turn away from madness. The camera zooms in and out with one wild cut after another. Such a mood fits The Exorcism of Emily Rose or Paranormal Activity. So much for those who came to the theater to see a movie about the Conservative Party.
As a portrayal of a living woman, it is sickening and without excuse. Obviously, this kind of treatment is limited only to someone who is right of center. Can anyone imagine a biopic focusing on a senile Nelson Mandela or Rosa Parks? To ask the question is to answer it. Even as the issues Thatcher championed have faded, as "New Labour" and other left-wing parties reconciled themselves to a diminished role for the unions, the rage against the Iron Lady is constant and enduring and the controversy about her continues. Websites have been set up to commemorate her death with a party, the comment boards on videos and articles about her are filled with furious vulgarity and loathing directed at woman who hasn't been in power for 20 years, and even the Conservative Party has backed away from “Thatcherism,” as much as they can, even to the point of changing the Party's logo from a flaming torch to a tree seemingly drawn by a child.
Out with the old, in with the green.
The result is that in some way, the portrait of a defeated and dying woman is the only kind of tribute the Kali Yuga can pay to a figure of importance who came from the wrong side. Meryl Streep (whose mimicry is skilled, but what of it?) sets the tone with the usual comment along the lines of "of course, I don't agree with her evil politics, but this portrayal makes her sympathetic." Similarly, the chattering class of Britain in the press and online have come to terms with this portrayal of Thatcher precisely because it shows the Iron Lady at her lowest point. Thatcher is, of course, racist, a traitor to woman, an enemy of workers, a woman who made people starve and completely destroyed Britain. As a human being, however, she is sympathetic because she is dying. In a culture where the highest value is self-loathing, this is perhaps the most a conservative can hope for.
Christmas at the End of Civilization
Words lose their meaning under our rulers, as with any other tyranny. Terms like “democracy” or “human rights” do not define a system of government or self evident qualities of mankind so much as serve as shorthand for progressive hegemony. If a state passes restrictions on immigration with massive popular approval, the media will describe it as an “anti-democratic” measure that violates “human rights.” However, if a national government openly bans a legitimate political party because they do not like the opinions of those in them, this will be described as an act in defense of “democracy.” This isn't incorrect. Democracy is, at its essence, the Church of Mediocrity Militant, and the fist of the system is no more apparent than in the mundane.
It's hard to think of anything more mundane or typical of modernity than Rihanna. At 23, she already boasts several Grammy's, almost a dozen top 100 hit songs, and most importantly, a role in the upcoming cinematic masterpiece Battleship (based on the board game). Rihanna also earned the coveted status of “victim” and “survivor” after her boyfriend at the time, Chris Brown, savagely beat her (after, it is rumored, she gave him herpes), and the resulting pictures were posted online. After a quick break, Brown was rewarded by earning millions singing songs about how many girls still want to sleep with him—after all, it's not like he said a racial slur. In his latest collaboration with the blue-eyed Cuban rapper “Pitbull,” Brown croons about how everyone in the Dominican Republic wants to immigrate to America.
Meanwhile, Rihanna doubled down on her image of promiscuity and vulgarity, flauntingly spending thousands of dollars at a sex shop in Paris, turning her concerts into barely concealed strip shows, and ensuring that your prepubescent daughter is singing songs about S&M, unless you live in an electronics-free cave. I should pause to note that she has also been officially named an “ambassador for tourism” for Barbados and is a “great source of national pride,” and so she is. While it's doubtful she's part of a one-world brainwashing scheme, Rihanna's vaguely mixed appearance (she was bullied for being “white” in Barbados) and auto-tuned, lowest common denominator, pop-urban schtick make her the perfect frontperson for global prolefeed.
Alas, even in the brave new age, there is the eternal enemy waiting to be stamped out. Rihanna was ignominiously chased out of a field in Ireland by a Democratic Unionist Party alderman named Alan Graham after she took her clothes off in his fields. For his trouble, he was besieged by hate mail accusing him of religious bigotry. Rihanna also had a troubled encounter in Portugal recently, where she supposedly encountered a racist hotel guest who said that black women dress like sluts. (Why would he think that?) She responded by tweeting to her 11 million followers about “cunts,” made a thinly veiled reference to penis size, and admitted she screamed at him. Proudly, she proclaimed, “My nigga came out.”
The Conventional Contrarian
Christopher Hitchens is dead. Amazingly, even in his final days and in horrible pain, he remained productive to the end.
Though he was the author of "Letters to a Young Contrarian," Hitchens in many ways exemplified the zeitgeist. Originally a socialist and a Trotskyite, he became a champion of mass democracy, aiming his broadsides at whatever remnants of the "permanent things" that somehow staggered into the 21st century. Hitchens understood like few others that contemporary liberalism ripped apart identity, culture, and religiosity with more fanaticism and intolerance than even the most dedicated Soviet commissar. More than that, he approved.
Perhaps the one honest neoconservative, he championed the Iraq War because he recognized it for what it was -- a fight so that one day, Baghdad too would have Rihanna, McDonald’s, and gay pride parades. While Pat Buchanan, the late Joe Sobran, and the late Sam Francis were
castigated as unpatriotic conservatives, Hitchens was warmly welcomed into the American Right. Even after declaring "god is not great," or worse, calling Ronald Reagan “stupid,” Hitchens continued to be sought out for interviews by movement conservatives.
Hitchens did have integrity, whatever else one may say about him. He was willing to follow wherever his ideas led, even if it cost him jobs, friends, or political allies. The sheer amount of work he produced is breathtaking, especially considering his many social appearances, speeches, interviews, and binges. His powers of concentration and will to work were fearsome.
Nonetheless, in the end, Hitchens was popular because in many ways he was what the culture needed. He was a “contrarian” who told the cultural elite what they wanted to hear, and dissented within permissible limits. He jumped from the trendy left to the neoconservative right and back, but never into forbidden territory. He mocked the divine, but held equality as unchallengeable and sacred. He hammered leftists for not living up to their own standards, as he understood their ideology better than they did. He blasphemed a dead God but clung desperately to the orthodoxies of the modern world. While his unheralded and more subversive brother writes about "The Abolition of Britain," Hitchens was warning us about Mormons. He was passionate and prolific, but in the end, predictable.
He will be honored by this world, as he should be. This is his world. Every day it moves ever closer to his vision. Would that the Alternative Right could produce a writer of his output, his erudition, and his effectiveness to make a new one.
Christopher Hitchens, dead at 62. Rest in peace.
The Paranoid Persuasion
With its November-28 cover story, “My Life as a White Supremacist,” Newsweek has published what amounts to an extended press release from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Featuring a flaming cross on the cover and pictures of brown-clad stormtroopers from the National Socialist Movement on the inside, one expects to read a suspenseful tale of intrigue and deception in the heart of America's vast Neo-Nazi underground—a kind of Turner Diaries in which The System is triumphant. What actually emerges is a story of government incompetence, the usual self-interested hyperventilating about a non-existent revolutionary movement, and the deluded actions of a sad old paleo-American, who sacrificed his life for people who hate him.
The story profiles one John Matthews, a Vietnam veteran and “ardent anticommunist” who had “long run in extremist circles.” Matthews, inspired by John Wayne, fought for his country in Vietnam. He returned to the United States, found that the nation “showed no respect for what he sacrificed,” and learned his comrades were contracting chronic health conditions from exposure to Agent Orange. Matthews become a part of the militia network around one Tom Posey, whom Oliver North and the Reagan Administration used to supply the Nicaraguan contras with weapons. Once he outlived his usefulness, however, Posey was prosecuted by the government. (Oliver North went on to Fox News.) Though he was eventually cleared, an embittered Posey allegedly began talking about stealing weapons and blowing up a nuclear plant to start a revolution. Matthews went straight to the FBI, who recruited him as an informant. He would stay an informant for the next 10 years.
The author of the piece, R.M. Schneiderman, then takes us on a rather boring adventure, as Matthews meets with various self-important militia leaders who talk about elaborate schemes . . . but don’t seem to do very much. Hilariously, Schneiderman notes Matthews’s handler was a Black named Donald Jarrett, who “wore nice suits and kept his hair closely cropped” (as if he’s assuring us that he wasn’t wearing dreadlocks and a hoodie.) Given that the DEA is looking for ebonics translators, I suppose we should be grateful for that. Without much of a story, Schneiderman resorts to a grab bag of various media clichés about the “far right” and simply mixes them all together. Matthews sat in church pews “with would-be abortion-clinic bombers” (no elaboration). A supposed Vietnam vet shows up to a meeting wearing a green bomber jacket, which, we are solemnly informed, “was popular among skinheads at the time.” The story picks up when this man talks about robbing armored cars . . . but unfortunately it turns out that he, too, is FBI agent. For a report about 10 years in the Nazi underground, there’s not much of an underground and seemingly no Nazis.
There is, however, some semblance of the American Right, and there’s always good money for a reporter who can pathologize it. Schneiderman sneers, “Posey went on about the New World Order, which to extremists like him meant the threat of global takeover by an assortment of international organizations including banks, the United Nations, and other elite institutions.” One sighs with relief that such a view has no basis in truth and is only held by “extremists.” Even so, if only Posey had dressed in all black, instead of camo, and taken a shit on a police car, he could have been recognized as a proto-Occupy protester and be getting an adoring interview on Democracy Now as we speak.
The End of the World
They seemed forced and excessively loud, conversations drawing in the larger audience rather than two people. The crowd at the Washington premiere had filled the theater, but laughed at the finale, a single sarcastic clap mixed with hoots of derision as the screen faded to black. Amidst the throng of jolly hipsters were small pockets of silence, eyes staring blankly, seeing something that was no longer there. It’s Lars von Trier. As Kirsten Dunst’s Justine says midway through the film, “What did you expect?”
Within the first moments of Melancholia, following a montage of striking photographs in motion, the Earth is obliterated by the eponymous rogue planet to the strains of Tristan und Isolde. After the apocalyptic prologue, Melancholia is a flashback divided into two parts. The first, “Justine,” focuses on the marriage of Dunst’s character to Alexander Skarsgard’s Michael. It begins on a light-hearted note, with a limousine trying and failing to navigate a narrow country road to the delight of bride and groom. Upon arrival at the castle, Justine’s sister Claire rips into them for their lateness, and we are thrust into a grim combination of family melodrama and comedy of manners. Over the course of the reception, Justine takes a nap, strips for a bath, steals a golf cart to urinate on the course, tells off her boss, and copulates with a random male guest. It is mostly portrayed with the utmost seriousness by Von Trier, with the comic exception of Udo Kier as a wedding planner that refuses to even look at the bride. The audience took it all as a romp, laughing aloud and leading me to wonder if I had stumbled into an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
The truth is Justine’s actions are eminently reasonable. The wedding is horrifying, rather than hilarious. The petty tyrannies of convention grind on and on unendurably. There are the fat girls stuffed into dresses, the lame jokes and forced laughter, the military-style schedule of her domineering sister, the nagging about cost, and the demands by her bourgeois employer to come up with a tagline for an advertisement. More than anything else, there are the repeated pleas by her sister, her brother-in-law, her groom, her father, and seemingly everyone around her that she “be happy.” Surrounded by dead- eyed relatives and plastic smiles, the reception is without spontaneity, without feeling, without significance, as if everyone there simply expects that spending money and wearing nice clothes can somehow create meaning. It is not a celebration, but just something you do.
The Great Unawakening
The population and leadership of the United States may be more sincerely Christian today than it was at the nation’s founding. Despite, or perhaps because of that, Christianity is on the brink of being driven from public life.
When the nation’s most prominent self-proclaimed “Christian” is probably Katy Perry and most effective policy advocate is Lady Gaga, it’s nonetheless remarkable to consider the strength and relative militancy of Christian belief in this country. The United States is unique among developed nations in the persistence of religious feeling. Solid majorities of every faith believe that “it is important” that a presidential candidate have strong religious beliefs (regardless of what they are). While poll takers either don’t care (or don’t want to talk about) their views on the racial makeup of their grandkids, almost half confidently say that if their daughter brings home a date with a Darwin fish, he’s going to be sent packing. Every single American President of the recent past, including Obama, has made sure to meet and pray with Billy Graham and publicly affirm their Christian beliefs, if only as a political maneuver.
Let’s go further. Can anyone imagine any of the presidential candidates, Republican or Democrat, writing a version of the gospel that had taken out the miracles and explicitly denied the divinity of Christ? Furthermore, can one imagine such a book being presented to every new member of Congress? While among movement conservatives it is fashionable to claim that the Founding Fathers were actually religious conservatives, this is the same kind of revisionist history that tells us that Martin Luther King Jr. was actually a great intellectual conservative, that only conservatives are truly against racism, and that the real victims of affirmative action are Blacks on the liberal plantation.
Of course, it was the author of our Declaration of Independence who wrote the aforementioned “Jefferson bible,” which was printed by and presented to members of Congress early in the last century. Jefferson contemptuously classified the Virgin Birth as a fable to be “classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter” and doubted the divinity of Christ. While Jefferson claimed adherence to the teachings of Jesus, he seems to have ignored, or not cared, that these moral teachings only make sense if Christ was the Son of God, else they were simply the ravings of a lunatic.
The Left: It Used to be Badass!
The hipster Soros-funded left wing youth group Campus Progress is hosting a caption contest. Here is the picture. I leave it to your wisdom, oh readers. 
Incidentally, this just shows the decline in left wing aesthetics. The face of the Left has gone from idealized workers staring towards a glorious future...
...to the hostile glare of a shoggoth the likes of which are stuffed behind every DMV counter.
The God That Failed
Heimdall by way of Detroit is not the main problem with Thor. It’s one thing to turn a heathen war god into a comic book. It’s another to turn him into a social democrat.
Kenneth Branagh’s Thor was obviously meant to be a desecration, and it’s already passé to point this out. The casting is so deliberately clumsy that it becomes ironically racist. Idris Elba as the “whitest of the gods,” Heimdall, had no purpose other than to deliberately undermine both European lore and even the comic. Elba’s defensive retort that “Elizabeth Taylor played Cleopatra” is hardly convincing. (If anything, Taylor’s casting was mistaken because she was probably far swarthier than inbred product of a blonde haired Ptolemaic ruling caste).
Beyond Elba, Branagh’s Asgard looks like some fruity multicultural Steampunk nightmare, with Thor accompanied by Asian warriors whose speech is barely comprehensible (one human even refers contemptuously to an Asian-Asgardian as “Jackie Chan.”) The movie constantly appeals to heathen lore, but then casually rips it apart. For example, Sif (Thor’s golden haired wife) is reinvented as a raven-haired grrl warrior out of G.I. Jane. Her place as Thor’s love interest is taken (inevitably) by Natalie Portman. Portman is (of course) an astrophysicist—she took the role to inspire girls to be scientists and fight stereotypes—and does her best to channel a less sexy version of Denise Richards as nuclear physicist Dr. Christmas Jones. As always though, Natalie Portman essentially plays Natalie Portman.
Superpowers
Truth, Justice, and the American Way isn’t enough for Superman anymore, as the Man of Steel has officially renounced his American identity to become a “citizen of the universe.” Rather than rage, the reaction among the American public and the right-wing blogosphere can best be described as resignation. Michelle Malkin mocked that even Superman was abandoning “Hope” as our bumbling quasi-American President careens from one disaster to another, and Lew Rockwell, always ready to miss the point (willfully?), thought that this was a victory for his version of anti-American anti-statism rather than just another step in the march towards post-national progressivism. It’s hard to feel shock; instead, one wonders what took them so long.
Superman had already essentially been retconned as a post-American in the latest revamp of the movie series, where Truth, Justice and the American Way was rephrased as “Truth, Justice, and… all that other stuff.” Of course, Superman already having been killed, cloned, brought back to life, and re-imagined as a Communist ally of Stalin, most Americans under 20 don’t know what an all-American looks like anymore—much as they don’t know what America used to look like when it was still America. Superman is simply following the historical trend of traditional and even iconic American symbols renouncing any particular attachment to the United States.
Partially, this is because there is no longer a traditional America left for Superman to defend. While the Man of Steel was once mocked as the “big blue Boy Scout” because of his corny Americana, in the post-America of today the Boy Scouts are a homophobic hate group unworthy of public accommodation. The whole point of Superman was that he was an alien who had so totally assimilated into Middle American norms and values that he had become synonymous with the country itself. However, as Middle America is condemned as racist, sexist, fascist, and proto-Nazi, Superman cannot be seen as associated with reactionary values.
Selfishness, the Movie
In 1994, Constantin Film had a problem. They possessed the film rights to the Fantastic Four but would lose them unless they made a movie right away. They also did not have the budget necessary to create the kind of film required.
This was the solution:
The director and actors were paid low salaries and told that if the movie was not released to theaters, it would at least be used as a pilot for a television series. The producers were lying—they had no intention of releasing the movie. However, this cinematic abortion allowed them to hold onto the filming rights.
In 2005, Constantin Film made another Fantastic Four movie, this one starring Jessica Alba. It had a budget of $100 million dollars. Needless to say, the special effects were a bit more sophisticated.
The difference between 1994’s Fantastic Four and Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 is that they released this one in theaters.
