VENNER'S BARE BODKIN

by Andy Nowicki

As a gesture, French ex-paratrooper, veteran right-wing activist, and all around macho badass Dominique Venner’s gunshot-through-the-head self-snuff in the cathedral of Notre Dame sends a powerful message, though I’m not entirely sure what that message is.

One reads Venner’s final words summarizing the rationale for his act, and he truly sounds like a man of sound mind, with a clear-headed notion of aesthetic intent regarding the ramifications of his messy, bloody, brain-splattering final exit at the altar of the historic Paris church. Still, it isn’t easy to discern just how news of an elderly comrade’s suicide is meant to rally the European New Right to fight mass immigration and demographic displacement with any greater determination or ferocity than before. News of a mentor’s auto-annihilation, after all, does not typically have the effect of firing up his pupils or inspiring them to risk their own lives for the cause. Suicide is not martyrdom; whatever we may think of self-slaughter, it cannot be conflated with self-sacrifice. One doesn’t give one’s life for a greater cause, at least not in any obvious way, by directly and deliberately ending it.

"THEY CAN'T TAKE AWAY MY DIGNITY"

The greatest love of all...

by Andy Nowicki

After several painful years of committing what may be called slow-motion suicide, pop singer Whitney Houston has perished at the age of 48, another wretchedly pitiful casualty of celebrity self-induced crapulence. Her burial earlier this month was accompanied by the same sort of flamboyant pomp and colorful fanfare that attended the funeral of Michael Jackson three years ago, and many of the usual suspects were on hand to exploit the tragedy of an early death for the purposes of egregious self-promotion. (Whenever someone Black and famous dies, that tubby walrus-like buffoon Al “Tawana Told the Truth” Sharpton seems to take it as his cue to stick his mug into every TV camera in sight and pontificate in his inimitably greasy way about America’s innumerable social ills, until you wish some renegade reporter would have the decency to smack him over the head with his microphone and yell, “Prophesy to us, O ebony Savior… Who hath struck you?”)

I am not immune to the pathos surrounding Ms. Houston’s demise, and I will pray for her eternal soul. The truth is, though, that her music was crap.