Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Cigar Store Intellectuals: Identity

Moral hysteria substitutes for many today in place of emotion. It's easy and cheap, and hysteria calls attention to oneself in ways hard to ignore. One can be noticed in a crowd. For those who have no life of their own, moral hysteria is a wonderful way of feeling that one has something inside other than dust. Hysteria is a way of filling out the hollow men, giving them the appearance of personality, perhaps the illusion of intelligence, even, if all that fails, of calling attention to ones morality and moral superiority. It's all show, of course, but if one were to point it out, ah, then the screaming fit goes off the scale. those who have no religion are religious; the amoral are moralistic; the ciminal are legalistic; the lazy and smug are officious. The vacuuous, having nothing in mind, play-act. The play today is "Find the Witch." The acting method is moral hysteria. The setting is the West. The villans are Modernists, racists, islamophobes, racists, and yaddda, yadda.... The heroes: they are the those who can scream the loudest at the slightest hope of an imagined p.c. infraction. Below we have the lyrics that set the scene for our investigation into Identity and Philobarbarism, the stuff that dreams of witch-hunts are made on.
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Recorded by hank williams
Written by hank williams and fred rose

Key: e capo: 2nd play: d

Kaw- [dm] liga, was a wooden indian standing by the door
He fell in love with an indian maid over in the antique store
Kaw-liga - a, just stood there and never let it [a7] show
So she could never answer yes or [dm] no.

He always wore his sunday feathers and held a tomahawk
The maiden wore her beads and braids and hoped someday he'd talk
Kaw-liga - a, too stubborn to ever show a sign
Because his heart was made of knotty pine.

Chorus
[d] poor ol' kaw-liga, he never got a kiss
[g] poor ol' kaw-liga, he don't know what he missed
[d] is it any wonder that his face is [a7] red
Kaw-liga, that poor ol' wooden [d] head. ... [dm]

Kaw-liga, was a lonely indian never went nowhere
His heart was set on the indian maiden with the coal black hair
Kaw-liga - a, just stood there and never let it show
So she could never answer yes or no.

Then one day a wealthy customer bought the indian maid
And took her, oh, so far away, but ol' kaw-liga stayed
Kaw-liga - a, just stands there as lonely as can be
And wishes he was still an old pine tree.

Chorus
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Our current batch of Western public intellectuals, many at least, are enamoured of the idea that the West is evil. They gather at academies to trade their aerie thoughts and cluck cluck over the madness of the masses too stupid and falsely conscious to see their plight as both victims of capitalism and as oppressors of the Third World and the Environment. Pity the poor media, the low-lights of the intellgentsia, who have to parrot the cliches of their betters. And woe to us who have to slog through their droppings in our daily newspapers.

The man on the street is by now becoming truly and deeply disgusted by the mainstream media's constant clacking and posing and admonitions. It's the pose of the moral hysterics in the pulpit and the busy-bodies with axes attacking beer kegs during the other prohibition that wears thin, this play having gone on too long without a break. These actors have to retire.

And yet, people keep asking why things are as they are. This p.c. script seems to be the only one they know, and though they know they don't like it, they don't know of one better.

In coming posts we'll examine some of the script that passes for intellectual discourse in our public arena, and we'll stand back to let the reader decide what it means. We'll look at those who proclaim the wonders of Indians and the evils of cultural imperialism and inherent racism. We'll look at the roots of identity fascism and perhaps see what it means when people without thoughts express themselves hysterically instead. If we can see them for what they are, perhaps we can treat they musings as deserved.

Please join us for our next post on "Identitiy Fascism." (Just don't let anyone know you read this: you might go to jail for religious vilification.)
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2 comments:

Pastorius said...

Dag,
Funny thing; everything you wrote in that post, people on the Left say about us, as well.

They don't believe the Islamic Jihadis are a threat, so they believe we are simply hunting witches.

However, of course, in your series, I know you will give lots of concrete examples. That's what the Left can not provide in order to back up their rhetoric. I challenge some leftists to prove to me that Islamic Jihadis are not a threat to people the world over.

Dag said...

I was afraid I'd have my chef's hat revoked what with mixing my metaphors above as I did. But yes, I'll go into hypergraphic detail about the sins of our Left dhimmi fascist idiot opinion makers. The approach is similar to that of the look we've had at ecology: detailed analysis of identity politics as exceptionalism on the basis of epistemology. That is to say, following Herder and Fichte, we'll look at how Man is split from Humanity and turned into identity as group object, to which I strenuously object, on grounds which I hope will be convincing as the argument unfolds.

Our first look will, sorry to say, come from one of the world's premier intellectual plodders, a social scientist, probably an anthropologist, whose name I can't recall off-hand and can't be bothered to think up. This writer, whose essay we'll look at, is so awful a thinker that his thinking is only rivalled by his writing. He's a paragon of Left idiocy, and because he's so horrible at his job he's perfect in his own way as the starting point from which to criique his so-called ideas, in this sorry and sad case, that Westerners, i.e. Europeans, stole The Land from the aboriginal peoples, and then, to authenticate themselves as residents, to legalize and validate their continued occupation of The Land they go even so far as to appropriate the "identity" of the native peoples.

The writer in question isn't exactly stupid in a biological and organic sense. His drivel is hard to take at the intellectual level because it's insultingly stupid and badly presented, but he's still adequately intelligent to put forth an argument that, though it seems to be coherent is only so at a level of self-induced madness.

I've also, and primarily, resisted addressing this topic and this essay because there are thechnical problems with my arguement that I wished to work out before I attack the thesis of this writer whose name I'll forget again as soon as I finish with him.

This topic on "Identity Fascism" is crucial in our time because it informs the public debate on multiculturalism and our response to jihad. If one identitiable group is excepted from the laws of Man, then all are exceptional, and there is no universality, there is no law, there is no morality beyond the conventional, the prudent, the relative. If Muslims are an identity unto themselves alone with a truth that is exclusive and determined by culture and tradition, then any and every group is entitled to the same exception from anything universal. If that's true, then we must except exceptionalism as the universal rule, must allow jihad as a legitimate expression of Islam and Muslim culture. If there is only truth as it is for groups, then group truth becomes group weltanschuung, and truth becomes meaningless in a universal sense, being particular to the group, reducable to such examples as science being true only to those who accept it as internally legitimate for their group, which leads to the literalness of expressions such as "Jewish science" and "German science." Yes, our idiot fascist dhimmi author will go so far as that, though in different phrases.

When we look at identity fascism we will see the Left taking on the very ideologies of Hitler plain and simple. It seems like hyperbole and it seems off-putting to write in these terms, I know, but the same sources who inform Hitler inform the Left today on the same issues. We have today not a threat of White fasicsm fromthe Right but Left dhimmi fascism.

I will show what there is to show and let the readers decide.