'CORIOLANUS': MAN AGAINST THE MOB

by Andy Nowicki

Many of those of a contemporary “alternative Right” orientation blame Christianity for bequeathing the dogma of egalitarianism to the modern world. Such people claim that the attempted abolition of natural hierarchies and the destructively “leveling” momentum of democracy and campaigns of enforced “equality” derive from the Christian doctrine that all human souls are equal before God, a notion which finds its most famous formulation in the words of St. Paul from his New Testament epistle to the Galatians: “In Christ, there is neither slave nor free, Gentile nor Jew, male nor female.”

I have written elsewhere on this subject; here it will suffice to observe that in the two millennia since Jesus Christ walked the earth, social, gender, and racial hierarchies have, prior to the cultural revolutions of the last few decades, generally remained untouched.

William Shakespeare, Christendom’s greatest playwright, lived at a time of great intellectual ferment and cultural tumult, yet even in his time both Protestant and Catholic alike affirmed the prudence of continued social stratification. If all men were equal before God, this in no sense mandated any presumption of equality of title or status between individuals, cultures, races, or sexes. If the serious Christian of the Reformation era took seriously Paul’s declaration regarding the absence of distinctions between different groups of humanity, he also acknowledged the divine origin of Biblical passages commanding slaves to obey their masters and instructing wives to be subservient to their husbands.

"THE STREET HARDLY UNDERSTANDS": THE CASE OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK

The following is an excerpt from Andy Nowicki's new book Notes Before Death: Three Essays , now available on Amazon.
Hear Andy read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," the poem discussed in this excerpt.

"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each
I do not think that they will sing to me."

by Andy Nowicki

Today, viewed from the perspective of a middle-aged English teacher, whose hair, like Prufrock's, is growing thin, I still find myself most captivated by Eliot's earliest work. As for "The Four Quartets," written later in Eliot's life and long after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, they leave me cold. There is something about them that is too airy-fairy, too abstract. "The Waste Land," Eliot's most celebrated poem, has its moments of power, but I can't make head of tail out of much of it, and really, couldn't he have cut back on the abstruse literary allusions just a touch? (Those who call Eliot a pedant are no doubt mostly prejudiced against him for his political and social views, but honestly, the guy could lay on the references and footnotes a bit thick at times.)

THE NIHILISM OF "NOW"-ISM

                                                             

by Andy Nowicki

The monstrous predominance of default agnosticism—the reflexive mindset of our era—reinforces a terrible gloominess in the sensitive soul.

Those of a more obtuse psychic composition are able to avoid the snares inherent in such a circumstance, since—being frivolous by nature or by habit—they can slough off such rhetoric with the sort of automatically-generated aplomb supplied by their carelessly-cultivated shallowness. Unfortunately, it cannot be so for those mindful enough to follow premises through to their logical conclusions. These instead are like the one who, in the words of T.S. Eliot, found himself “much possessed by death/ And saw the skull beneath the skin.” For such as Eliot’s protagonist, being smacked in the face with the prospect of moribund, maggoty meaninglessness is simply too much to endure. Such seekers as these are aware of a need for greater nourishment than what they are being offered, else they will starve.

IN THE THICKE OF THE TWERK

by Andy Nowicki

Folks have reportedly been shocked and shattered by the aesthetic grotesqueries displayed by Miley Cyrus’s full-throttle sexed-up meth-bimbo act at the MTV Video Music Awards last Sunday. But the onstage schtick she stuck in the nation’s face during her performance of the vacuously generic party-anthem We Can’t Stop isn’t anything new; I caught the dubious scent a few days ago when I came across the bizarre video for this inexplicably chart-topping single, which, far from being sexily hedonistic, is downright creepy in its unsparing depiction of youthful degradation. (See also Colin Liddell's useful analysis of the video.)

Gone are the Daisy Duke shorts, the lustrous locks and the winsome eyes of Miley in her Party in the U.S.A. teen-tease phase. Even the smokin’ hot jailbait seductress look of Can’t Be Tamed is nowhere to be seen. What we have here is an entirely different vibe from anything that preceded it in the Miley canon, from Hannah Montana's premiere episode through to the present.

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.