Culture is Upstream of Politics – What Does that Mean to Me

This was Andrew Breitbart’s explanation for why we needed to assert our place in social media and entertainment and other arenas of our culture.  And he was right.  That explains why Google, Facebook and Twitter are desperate to remove the Right from the public square.  They can’t win in the marketplace of ideas and they certainly can’t win in the meme wars.  So banished we must be.

And that is why we need our own platforms.  So far, we’re laughably outgunned everywhere we look.  Something like Facebook has a membership in the billions.  So even looking at something like Gab which has had a huge influx of displaced non-leftists is dwarfed by a factor of almost a thousand to one.  And there is absolutely no comparison to the monetary discrepancy.  We’re microscopic.

But even a site like this, which is invisible to Google, is important.  That’s because it gives us a place to go where we can say what we believe without being shut down or told we’re evil.  And we can come here to hear and tell news.  I’ve found some very interesting links from readers who shared them in the comments.

And even more important it gives us a sense of being part of something extended in space.  There are people from all fifty states and other countries who come here.  Some come for movie and book reviews.  Some come for photography articles.  But most come to read something by people on our side of the aisle.  Some disagree with what I have to say.  Some have already abandoned the mainstream parties and are waiting for some catastrophe to reset the existing order and provide an opportunity for regime change.  Much of what they say about society is deadly accurate.  I do differ with them on the conclusions they draw about what is and isn’t possible in the way of reform.  And I don’t deny that I could be wrong and they could be right.  But currently I haven’t given up on the future of the United States.  I think there may be scenarios where the red and blue states agree to disagree and allow a looser federalism on these freedoms that we want.  This would be similar to how some states have ignored the federal illegal status of cannabis.

I find the range of opinions on the Right healthy.  None of us really know how any of this is going to end up.  But talking to other people provides me with feedback.  For the most part we don’t have very heated arguments like some of the ones I’ve seen elsewhere but screaming matches aren’t really necessary.  Twenty or thirty words is sometimes more than enough to allow someone to make a point.

One thing I would be interested in is hearing more from the next generations.  Tyler from the Portly Politico comes here often and it’s obvious that he’s not of my generation.  But I wish I had a dozen more of the kids here.  If you know of any younger folks on the Right, please send them a link.  I think they are the most important people for us to reach.  I think exposing them to the things that are now essentially excluded from the mainstream social media sites is vitally important.  And I think it’s an easy sell.  The present-day culture is thin.  From a male perspective it’s weak and boring.  Comparing the model of traditional family life to the deracinated Gaia worship currently passing for a lifestyle should be a slam dunk.

So, I’ll say I think Andrew Breitbart was correct.  We need to win the culture war but up until today we haven’t even shown up on the battlefield.  But there’s no time like the present so I do my part and I encourage everyone to join in and even invite new faces especially the young to participate.  So, rightists of the world unite.  Throw off your chains of Facebook and flock to orionscoldfire.com where the cool kids hang out.

Guest Contributor – The Fat Man – Antifa, Sci Fi, The Bomb, Consumerism and The Death of Innovation – Part 1

What does it mean when organizations like Antifa and BLM lead the national conversation but are led and populated by arrested, overfed, near-sighted, screen-addicted, basement dwellers? How can these loosely defined groups and others like them write and profess to follow manifestos built on concepts like fascism and communism, the nuclear family and non-binary identity, equality and liberty while clearly not understanding any of them. If we suppress the urge to laugh it off for a few seconds and consider what it means about our country and the West more generally, would that be useful or at least entertaining?

And finally, that our president uses these same concepts in the same contexts as these groups without pausing to at least try and clarify them, does that mean he’s actually their leader too or just the world’s greatest comic?

When you look at the endless tape of the peaceful demonstrators or if you’re lucky as I am and can simply look at the window and watch them at a distance, it is easy to be lulled into a lazy sense of voyeuristic unease. From far away the individuals in the crowds are reduced to hats and black raincoats all carrying some kind of staff and easily mistaken for at least a potential threat. Of course, when the camera pans to ground level or you even walk among them you realize they are those kids you remember from high school, if that was your terminal level of formal education, or junior college, or grad school, even a familiar post doc.  Whatever larval group of which you were a graduating member always included the kids that just weren’t ready, would never be ready, for the real world.

Our peaceful protesters are not the serious kids that just quit school to pursue real careers in crime, banking or software. I’m talking about the ones with the anachronistic long or shaved hair, over decorated skin and clothes, downward facing and backward looking. The basement dwellers, scared of life. Say what you will about Mao and Hitler, they weren’t scared of life. So how did our heroes become their self-appointed fellow travelers?

What brought our contemporary heroes out of the basement to frighten America? More interestingly, how could they frighten anyone? If you’re old enough to remember the summers of rage at the end of the 1960’s you know what real racial unrest looks like. Or anyone that has seen strike violence knows why it scares the average citizen. Those mobs were manned by the citizenry. However segregated Newark was in 1965, the city couldn’t survive with twenty percent of the population burning down buildings, and it didn’t. The Newark of 1962 was disappeared by 1975. Depopulated, de-educated, de-legitimated, poof.

But clearly our heroes didn’t, couldn’t, do that in 2020. The viral panic set the stage. It emptied out the streets like the white flight of the ‘60’s but didn’t spark the theatrical violence we see today. So, what did? Beyond the familiar slacker jobless ennui that inspired the Occupy Wall Street encampment and their occasional traffic-arbitraging self-immolations, what caused this moment? Racism? The word is its own answer. In 1968, even in Jefferson and Baltimore during the Obama years, the putative victims of racism did the rioting. Today it’s largely The Muppets.

The Muppets, hmmm, TV….is that a clue? Roger Scruton, who died in January of our anni mirabiles, took pains to remind us that it is culture, more specifically our definition of aesthetics, precisely the meaning of beauty that is the best way to understand a society. The poor man described the pain he experienced standing on a train platform while traveling in America and finding no escape from “the beat”, the deadening, soulless rhythm of western pop music. The reader can imagine how he felt about our other contemporary cultural products. Our visual arts, our architecture, the terrible things we expose and teach to our children. He no doubt finally rests in peace.

In pacem para bellum. In peace, for war. If you want peace, prepare for war. If we want beauty, if we want wisdom, if we want a growing and enterprising society, what kind of citizens do we need? Citizens. Growing. Are our heroes citizens? Are they growing? They do somehow look familiar? Like the barricade denizens of ’68? No, no they were rich French student hippies. More like tropes from the movies or even a comic book. Yes. But not old movies or comic books, more recent, like graphic novels or The Matrix. Yes, that’s it, they all seem to be aspiring to the art direction that gussied up Keanu Reeves (I only now realized that he has that most famous of comic book actor last names). I get it, our heroes want to be real heroes. But they only know Keanu or Deckard, a few other dystopian action figures. They are graphic heroes. We might charitably call them expressionistic.

Like all contemporary culture actors, our heroes carry the contradictions of Cultural Marxism. They attack the culture, humiliate the bourgeoisie, their parents, their schools, their unemployment offices, then retreat to the basement and their protection. It’s easy to hate them, but for America it is hard to admit she created them. How did it happen, they happen?

For me, it is far more interesting to answer the question by looking at the cultural collapse they reflect. When we do, we will know what the Muppets mean and why America chose them to use to frighten itself.

Why would America want to frighten itself? It’s evident it wants to, hosting all the Devil’s Nights it has in 2020, long before Halloween in places like Portland, Brooklyn and The Loop. In the shadow of the protests the professional criminals can come out of their nests, wave guns at their rivals and redraw their maps. America suffers all this to stir herself, especially our suburban cousins that so swear by the “peaceful protests”, so long as they only burn urban America. It is said when the protests came to Portland’s burbs, the curtains were drawn. Mission accomplished, the brief, but cold snap of fear did penetrate the high-tax school zones.

But from what do we now stir?  Covid, Trump, the caliphate, financial collapse, Iraq, Afghanistan, The Towers, the Kennedys? No, these were mere media trifles, like the Beatles. But they seemed important at the time, serious, didn’t they? In sleep even a fly seems serious and we fell asleep long before the Kennedys. What are the symptoms of sleep that can tell us when we fell? And why do we sense it’s time to get up?

Let’s follow Sir Roger’s advice and take America’s vitals through whatever we can call its culture for ten seconds without laughing. We are told that American popular music was born out of traditional, gospel, anthem and transplanted light opera genres. These genres evolved into what we call R&B and Jazz, Country. The ethnic music of Southern and Eastern European immigrants mixed together with native genres in vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley. All of this seemed to gel on the Broadway of the twenties to become what we today call the American Song Book.

You could argue that the ASB did not reach the high musical standard of the opera Toscanini brought to New York and later popularized through radio broadcasts on NBC. But looking back from today’s vantage, in the context of twenty first century western pop music, it sure seems to fit the label of art.

You can make a similar case for American movies. It’s true, there was no visual equivalent to Jazz to act as a foundation for American cinema. But the originality and popularity of Chaplin and Keaton’s output, their success at creating visual conventions that became an almost universally accepted, but wordless, language convinced even arid academic critics that the movies were developing a set of aesthetics that would one day support an artform.

None of this can be said of the other plastic visual arts in America such as painting, sculpture and with the exception of Wright, architecture, all of which were mired in the outpouring of European Modernism throughout the first half of twentieth century. And while there were many interesting American poets and writers, even leading figures such as Stein, Pound and Eliot, their work was primarily grounded in European ideas and precedents.

The fiction of the American Naturalists, Norris, Crane and Dreiser, could be argued to be American originals, but theirs was at best a minor native movement that did not blossom greatly as a literary genre, but did interestingly have an impact on film. Faulkner and his “school” could also be added to this list and can be usefully tracked as we diagnose what ails America.

Another fruitful area of American creativity and certainly the most materially successful is what is today referred to as innovation. Defined simply as growth generating change, innovation is an almost perfect, if indirect, measure of American culture. To innovate a culture must have intact, functioning communities capable of supporting a network of collaborating and competing enterprises. These simultaneous conditions can only exist in places where the culture not only supports the formal rule of law, but voluntary associations such as craft clubs that create the social capital needed to invest in creating new products and services. Innovation shares these requirements with all native American artforms.

We will use these cultural creations, American music, movies, some of its literature and compare it to the advance of innovation in the twentieth century, the American Century, to understand why in the twenty first, the homeland finds itself nurturing fear through home-grown hobgoblins in the form of hand puppets.

End of Part 1

 

Guest Contributor – The Fat Man – Antifa, Sci Fi, The Bomb, Consumerism and The Death of Innovation – Part 2

My Take on Yarvin’s Essay “The Deep State vs The Deep Right”

Last night I clicked on the American Mind website and saw that Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) had a new post up.  The title was “The Deep State vs The Deep Right.”  I find Yarvin’s ideas interesting but at the same time in some ways obscure.  In this new essay he states that the only way to overthrow a regime you live under is to undermine its authority with a more attractive idea.  He puts this in terms of aesthetics.  His case in point is the Czar.  According to Yarvin the Russians overthrew their government by first convincing everyone including the Czar that they needed to adopt the British outlook on life.  And since socialism was the religion of the British elites at that time what better way to emulate them than by taking their ideal and turning it up to eleven via Marx’s writings.  Yarvin’s point is that art (in this case the 19th century Russian novelists) had prepared the Russians for the replacement of the monarchy long before the Bolsheviks came on the scene.

Yarvin’s idea is that what is needed to overthrow the current neo-liberal order is an aesthetic to replace the aesthetic our current elites espouse. This is the confusing part.  When he talks of aesthetics and art he’s talking about books and music and movies.  You are probably asking yourself how does this get Nancy Pelosi off of the Speaker’s podium?  And that’s a fair question.  As much as I’d love to write the ultimate science fiction novel that shifts the balance of power from the Left to us, I don’t see how that happens.  Yarvin points to Bronze Age Mindset as a sort of first attempt at moving the aesthetic in our direction.  And maybe it is.  Apparently, it was very popular with younger men and showed there is a market for dissident ideas out in the real world.

Okay, so why should I care about any of this?   Well, because I kinda know what he’s saying.  The people who want to tell us what to do, say and think aren’t going to believe us when we say their ideas are wrong.  They think that what we believe and who we are is stupid.  They are convinced that what they believe and who they are is smart.  We are going to have to make our case in the court of public opinion.  We are going to have to show them that our ideas are better and stronger than theirs.

From the point of reason, it shouldn’t be too hard to convince people that things like screwing up the hormones of an eight-year-old boy and then castrating him is not sane.  But remember, we don’t have the microphone so we don’t get to tell the story on tv.  We’ll have to work on back channels like blogs and self-published books and podcasts.

But of course, that isn’t enough.  What I’m hearing from Yarvin is we’ll need to convince and recruit the intelligentsia in order to get the microphone we want and need.  That’s a pretty tall order but I think Yarvin’s got something there.  We have to get people who speak their language, academics and artists to make the case that our world view is sane and theirs is crazy.  Specifically, we’ll need some medical doctors and psychiatrists and ethicists to expose the nightmare logic at work.  We’ll need documentary and dramatic filmmakers to sway public opinion.  But first we’ll need judges and lawyers and cops and even politicians to have the courage to confront these lunatics who defend these practices and hold them accountable.

So, there’s the pipe dream we need to dream.  We have to turn the world upside down, or right side up if you look at it from our point of view.  And the first step is to identify the weakest points of the current system and attack them.  And to attack them we have to show the world what we would put in its place.  I would say that the beginning of such an enterprise requires a lawfare approach.  We’ll need a Circuit Court with jurisdiction over a blue state that has adopted the most flagrantly perverse law and have a lawyer challenge that behavior at the Circuit Court level and have it struck down.  That would trigger a storm that would catch the attention of national press and allow public opinion to hear our side of the story from the judges and the plaintiffs.  After the dust settles it will make a good book, an interesting documentary and maybe even a decent movie although we probably wouldn’t be able to get any A-listers involved.  But it’ll be a good start.

This idea highlights why it is such an important thing to have President Trump appointing judges to the Circuit and supreme Court in the numbers he is doing.  He is close to flipping the Ninth Circuit and that court rules over California and the rest of the Left Coast.  That is a place where a lot of wonderful damage can be done.  I think I see what Yarvin is talking about.

 

Now what do you think?  If you agree or sort of agree or even strenuously disagree, I’d like to hear from you.  This site is to allow me to have my say but also to here what everybody else thinks.  Leave a comment in the section below and get to have your two cents.

Orion’s Cold Fire – The Origin Story

Now, you’re gonna have to bear with me for a bit.  This will be a rambling seemingly incoherent rant.  But I’ll try by the end to bring it back to the point.

 

Over the course of the last few years I have become aware of the range of “philosophies” and personalities that exists on the right wing.  I do not have an exhaustive knowledge of all the players, nor do I want or need to.  I think it would be fair to say these personalities run the gamut from extremely sober to raving lunatic.  And over the course of the last few years this has given me reason to pause and consider how or if I fit in with this spectrum of individuals.  Surprisingly, I have learned that not all the serious individuals are right and not all of the nuts are wrong.  Now, that doesn’t make it easy to commune with the lunatics.  In fact, most of the time you probably shouldn’t.  Lunatics tend to the mercurial and don’t always play well with others.  But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hear what they are saying.  And by the same token, the sober guys may be charming and polite individuals but listening to them may be counter-productive.  Especially if they are extremely clever.  Sophistry can be highly entertaining and unfortunately also highly deceptive.  To my mind that is kind of how we got where we are now.  Cheerleaders for supposedly conservative ideas convinced a lot of people that the Bushes and John McCain and Mitt Romney knew what the word conservative means.  That was sophistry.

 

So, the people you agree with logically aren’t the same as the people you enjoy listening to.  What that means is that you tend to have to compartmentalize your relationships.  Some people you can discuss your political beliefs with easily and other people you can’t.  Some people are fun to discuss zombie movies with and others only want to discuss the actual apocalypse.  It’s not the most comfortable arrangement imaginable.  It’s sometimes annoying.  And it’s the way things are going to be for the foreseeable future.  Trying to avoid this reality will lead to trouble.  For example, suppose you have a good friend who likes the same sports you do.  The two of you can go to a ball game anytime and sit up in the stands and talk all day about Joe Dokes’ batting average or who the best relief pitcher is.  It’s great.  But if you try discussing politics with him you’ll end up in a shouting match and probably won’t want to get together for months.  Very not great.  And alternatively, you might know someone either in real life or on the web who you agree with politically almost completely.  The two of you can discuss politics and even cooperate on political action and other projects.  A mutually beneficial relationship.  But otherwise you have nothing in common.  You like country music he’s a gangsta rap enthusiast.  You like science fiction he reads books on playing golf.  Absolutely no common ground.  What about these two scenarios?

What about them?  There’s nothing wrong with either one.  They reflect the reality of the world around us.  You accept that division.

 

Now, of course, the best case scenario is when both spheres align.  Now you can talk about baseball and the revolution at the same time.  Better still, you can start a fantasy baseball league for right wingers!  And for something like baseball or hockey or NASCAR you might do quite well lining up people who fit both sides of the equation.  No problem!

 

But what if your interest is photography or science fiction?  Now it’s not so easy.  If you happen to be a photographer and also happen to not be a left winger you’re probably aware that the majority of photographers both professional and amateur skew pretty hard left.  As with a lot of the “creative” professions these people seem to be steeped in a bohemian, urban culture that is extremely hostile to right-wing values and individuals.  When I first got interested in photography I experienced this hostility over and over at a number of photography websites.  It was both on a subliminal level and also on a purposeful, even confrontational basis.  Whenever anything in the news offended the denizens of these sites it inevitably was dragged through the forum pages in the most strident and challenging terms.  Basically, it was a public challenge to deny the libel being foisted.  And interestingly if you succeeded in presenting a logical argument that was too convincing, the powers that be on the site were very likely to step in and either erase your posts (or force you to erase them) or ban you from the site altogether.  To say this was a sorry state of affairs would be an understatement.  The only way to coexist (what a loaded word) in such an environment would be to keep your mouth shut and ignore these virtue-signaling spasms.  You can only imagine how much fun that would be.  But there was no other way.  Eventually I found one website that had a policy that I found commendable.  They specifically forbade divisive discussions that involved non-photographic topics.  So, no political, racial, religious or ethnic discussions were allowed to drift into an argument.  It could be a little restrictive but it totally avoided the type of nonsense I was discussing above.  Interestingly, I could still tell which individuals would be the worst offenders if it was allowed.  They were always the ones being censured by the moderators.  And it never was anyone on the right being stopped.  Always rabid leftists.  You could tell they thought it was highly unfair that they were not allowed to lecture us all on the topic of the day.  I have to confess I took a good deal of delight in posting complaints against the worst offenders whenever I could.  But it was still only a grudging allowance of what was obviously a despised minority opinion.  I believe the site owner was a right-wing guy who found that, to avoid alienating the lefties, the best he could do was try to avoid all flash points.  He knew that the demographics were against him and he settled for this uneasy truce.  I still have great respect for the way he maintained that arrangement.  It was the best environment that existed for right-wing photographers that I ever found.

Another of my interests is (or was and now is again) science fiction and fantasy stories.  Growing up in the nineteen sixties and seventies I can remember finding all the classic books by the Golden Age authors and just eating that stuff up.  And there was all kinds of range to the quality of the stories.  Some were great and some were pretty bad.  And even as a kid I knew that.  And yet, I could still enjoy even the bad ones because at least they were of a kind.  They involved science and adventure and space flight and alien creatures and time travel and inter-dimensional mumbo-jumbo and especially cover art involving scantily clad green-skinned women.  Who could ask for anything more?  But as time passed and it moved into the late seventies something started to change.  Fantasy books weren’t about orcs and dwarves.  They were about nature spirits fighting back against modern western civilization to protect Mother Gaia.  And science fiction wasn’t about humans exploring the galaxy but sexually confused individuals exploring their various orifices.  And along with all these “improvements” was the overarching message that the most important problem that science fiction and fantasy needed to solve was how can we make books that no straight white men would want to read?

And I’ll be the first to admit they succeeded with a vengeance.  For a few years I still picked up new books and gave them a try.  But without a doubt something bad had happened.  It was like all the nit-wits who had made the sixties into a stinking hippie nightmare went off and got MFA’s and started writing sf&f.  And worse still they had taken over the publishing houses and the awards ceremonies and only allowed their own kind of stories to make it to the bookstore shelves.  Well, eventually I stopped trying and gave up on the genres.  I figured it was me.  I was no longer a child and I had to put away childish things.  But a few years ago, I read about the Sad Puppies.  I think the link was at PJ Media.  After reading about the Hugo Awards and the way nominations were only handed out to those who fit the club and wrote only right-think it all clicked.  I read all I could about the Puppies and started picking up some of their books.  And they were good!  Of course, not everything was great.  Some was just okay.  But all of it was recognizable as sf&f.  And there was a community of people who believed in writing stories and not social justice agit-prop.  And they had websites where like-minded individuals could talk and discuss writing and stuff they liked without having to get approval from the better sort.  And I heard them talk about what it used to be like before the Puppy movement, how everyone had to kowtow to the better sort and if you wanted to get ahead you had to like the right sort of stories and hold the right kind of ideas.  And how even if you went through this kabuki act you still had to wait your turn and if you had the wrong plumbing and skin tone chances were you wouldn’t ever get a shot at the brass ring.

But what really sounded familiar was how everyone had to hate the same things.  There was an orthodoxy and if you didn’t hate George Bush and the military and straight white men, then you were cast out.  And that I recognized.  It was the same group-think I had seen on the photography sites.  These were the same people.  The Artists.

And it got me thinking.  If the Puppies could do it for sf&f why couldn’t I make a photography site where right-wing opinion wasn’t something you had to hide.  Now I wasn’t looking for some kind of gated community where only right-wing right think was allowed.  But a place where I wouldn’t have to hear a two minute hate every time Donald Trump’s name was in the news.

So that’s kind of my whole reason for making this site in a nutshell ( a very long 1900 word nutshell).  I wanted this site to allow me to discuss right-wing issues both seriously and with a little humor.  That’s for all those folks who agree with me politically but don’t speak my language on hobbies.

And for those who happen to also have an interest in either sf&f or photography it’s a place where I could talk about those things.  And other general things like tv and movies and other culture topics with like-minded people.  So, if any of those things interest you stop by and have a look and leave a comment.

And finally after the revolution when I am elevated to the highest circles of the new order, hopefully in the movie version of my life story I’ll be played by Ryan Reynolds and Morena Baccarin will play Camera Girl.  And they really should include “Angel in the Morning” in the soundtrack but absolutely nothing by Wham!  They really suck.

See I told you I’d bring it all back in the end.