Seasonal Thoughts and Old Movies (Will Rogers)

I’m spending time with family, and it’s hard to muster my attention and time to create a substantial post. It hasn’t been the cheeriest of holidays for patriotic conservatives. Our Muslim enemies have decided to make this the season of choice for terrorist attacks, but as usual no one will speak honestly about the simple way to solve this problem. Our lame-duck Congress gave us a couple of “gifts” like the official repeal of the ban on homosexuals in the military, that also cast a pall over the  season. More disturbing than the repeal was, perhaps, the complete absence of public discourse even touching on the possibility that there might be negative consequences to having open homosexuality in our military. I was delighted that the NIGHTMARE Act failed to pass, but wasn’t happy to notice, when doing Christmas and post-Christmas shopping, that the major department stores are ALL posting prominent Spanish-language signs, as if by prior agreement. When will the American people wake up to this?

In any case we mustn’t allow our enemies to rob us of the spiritual joy and wonder of Christmas. It gets harder to find it in the outside world, so we have to look within and in our families and communities to find it.

I watched the 1933 Will Rogers film Doctor Bull on Turner Classics – a charming portrait of the old America. Rogers plays a doctor in a small New England town who “delivers most of its residents into the world and tries to delay their departure from it as long as possible.” Rather than being a saintly character, he is a bit curmudgeonly with those villagers who demand that he check every ache and pain; when he loses patience, he dismisses them with his standard recommendation that they take a good dose of castor oil! Still, he labors on to save lives through vaccinations and other unglamorous measures, for which he is inadequately recognized.

“Doc” Bull incurs the emnity of some of the village gossips, who disapprove of his harmless flirtation with the widow, Mrs. Cardmaker. When typhoid breaks out in the village, his foes attempt to have him removed from his position, although the real cause of the epidemic seems to be the failure of the owner of a local construction camp to keep the water supply clean. The good doctor, in the end, is able to ride out the crisis and arrive at a happier place in life.

Will Rogers (1879-1935) was one of our best known and best loved public figures. Born on a ranch in Oklahoma, he became a vaudeville performer, actor, public speaker, radio  personality, and writer, one who was said to always have his finger on the pulse of the American people. He died quite needlessly in Alaska in a small plane crash of the sort that used to happen all the time. He was most remembered for his folksy quips expressing a kind of country common sense–I’m sure he was an influence on Ronald Reagan. My generation, though, knew little about him. I always thought he was an actor in Westerns, but that was not his main activity. One of my in-laws lives near a school that is named after him. Needless to say, I doubt that the younger generation has been taught about him at all.

I have a book entitled The Best of Will Rogers by Bryan B. Sterling (New York: Crown Publishers, 1979) that is mostly a collection of his quotes. I’d prefer to read longer pieces by him, but meanwhile here are a few quotes from him that I’m sure you’ll find apt. Till next time, my best wishes for a Happy New Year!

I originated a remark many years ago that I think has been copied more than any little thing that I’ve ever said–and I used it in the Zigfield Follies of 1922. I said America has a unique record: we never lost a war and we never won a conference in our lives. I still believe we could, without any degree of egotism, single-handed lick any nation in the world, but we can’t even confer with Costa Rica and come home with our shirts on.

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If America ever passes out as a great nation, we ought to put on our tombstone: America died from a delusion she had Moral Leadership.

Say, if we had any morals, we would use ‘em ourselves.

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No matter what we do, we are wrong. If we help a nation, we are wrong; if we don’t help ‘em, we are wrong. There just ain’t any such animal as International Good Will. It just lasts till the money you lent ‘em runs out.

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On the Riviera in France, they found a bunch of people wearing no clothes and not particularly caring who they were married to, and they called it a cult.

Over here we call it society. [He means the elite or upper class.]

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America is a great country, but you can’t live in it for nothing.

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Of all the things that this country is suffering from, the greatest is an overproduction of organizations. When Judgement Day comes, half of America will be on their way to some convention, and the other half will be signing application blanks.

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Americans have one particular trait that they need never have any fear of some other nation copying, and that is we are the only people that will go where we know we are absolutely not wanted.

Last year Americans spent $700,000 to be insulted in Europe, and they could have got it done for half the money over here.

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We are the champion yap nation in the world for swallowing propaganda. You can take a sob story and a stick of candy and lead America right off into the Dead Sea.

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We are the first nation in the history of the world to go to the Poorhouse in an automobile.

Why it is Impossible to Reason with the Academic Left

Or, How Modern Higher Education Destroys the Human Mind

In the course of searching for something on the Internet, I happened upon some comments on the movie Avatar on a website aimed at a strongly academic, “postmodern” audience. I will reproduce the comments below. The author called herself an American expatriate living in Europe.

Actually, I agree that her question is an important one. Why is an anti-Western, anti-American movie so popular in America? And, in a sense, her answers, despite the ponderous academic jargon, are as good as any. They are fumbling to understand the almost indescribably strange and unreal quality of our popular culture, which simultaneously condemns and degrades everything we are and have been, while “de-familiarizing” what they portray so that we feel we are outside of, or above, what is being condemned.

Sadly, the sophisticated “theories” she learned in college and graduate school, far from helping her to understand what is happening to her country, have made her egregiously, probably irredeemably, blind to that reality. I am afraid that this is the sort of American who will continue to feel white guilt even as her throat is being cut.

I just got back from seeing Avatar. Great movie! Sure, the Na’vi are portrayed in stereotyped, “Orientalist” terms, and the plot is just another version of the old story of someone who “goes native” – think Lawrence of Arabia or Dances With Wolves. But Cameron obviously intends these “natives” to serve as a symbol of the various indigenous peoples who have been victimized by America throughout its history, from Native Americans to the people of the Philippines, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

I’ve been living abroad for some time, so maybe I’ve lost touch with life in the American Empire. How can such an anti-imperialist film be so popular? Have the people become Marxist-Leninists? Or have they turned the other way, to Rush Limbaugh isolationism?

Could it be an example of “incorporation,” as the Marxists call it, where the dominant ideology takes a dissenting position and emasculates it and makes it safe for the masses? Or is this an example of the “carnival” Bakhtin theorized about, where a temporary inversion of the conventional moral values enables the catharsis of the tribe’s suppressed fears?

Maybe the general public is too bloody stupid to notice the extremely obvious political message behind the special effects. Even many of the more astute critics totally missed the point, interpreting it only in the hackneyed language of race.

I wonder if anything like this has happened before. Can you imagine Germans in the Nazi era watching films portraying Germans as the bad guys, and Jewish Communists as the heroes? What about in ancient Rome, Imperial Japan, the British Empire, the Umayyad Caliphate? Normally, collective self-punishment takes place after everything has collapsed. Does it ever happen before that, when things are still going pretty smoothly?

The Peaceful Warrior-King: Enemy of Progress? (More on The Lady of the Lake)

O minstrel Harp, still must thine accents sleep?
‘Mid rustling leaves and fountains murmuring,
Still must thy sweeter sounds their silence keep,
Nor bid a warrior smile, nor teach a maid to weep?

(Lady of the Lake, Canto I)

Most wars, I suppose, are caused in one way or another by a territorial conflict between two peoples. It is simply a fact of life that to be a people requires that there be some territory that belongs exclusively to that people. Historically, the differences between even similar peoples have been sufficient to cause much bloodshed. We Americans have our own experience of civil war to show how fragile peace and national unity can be.

Walter Scott, in The Lady of the Lake (1810) (1), portrays a 16th-century conflict between James II, King of Scotland, who is attempting to bring the Border region under control, and a (fictitious) rebellious Highland clan, the Alpine, led by Roderick Dhu, vengeful and cruel, yet honorable in his way. The “lady of the lake” is the beautiful Ellen with the angelic singing voice, living in hiding on an island in Loch Katrine under Roderick’s protection. Her father is Douglas, former Earl of Bothwell and attendant to the king, who has been banished from his estate due to suspected hostile intentions towards the throne. Douglas and his daughter seek reconciliation and peace, but the volatile Roderick, hearing reports of a mustering of the king’s followers for war, summons his clan to war. Ellen is pursued by both Roderick and one James Fitz-Hugh, who has wandered into Highland territory while hunting, but she refuses them in favor of her beloved, Malcolm. After a duel in which Fitz-Hugh kills Roderick, Douglas and Ellen achieve peace by surrendering themselves to the King – where a final surprise awaits them. The king restores Douglas to his rightful position and orders an end to the hostilities.

Grounding his story in the contrast between the Gaelic-speaking, not-quite-civilized Highland Scots and the “Saxons” or Anglicized Scots under James, Scott paints a romantic picture of warriors on both sides, extolling their courage, vitality, and masculine beauty. Fitz-Hugh, for example, is portrayed thus:

On his bold visage middle age
Had slightly press’d its signet sage,
Yet had not quench’d the open truth
And fiery vehemence of youth;
Forward and frolic glee was there,
The will to do, the soul to dare,
The sparkling glance, soon blown to fire,
Of hasty love, or headlong ire.
His limbs were cast in manly mould,
For hardy sports or contest bold;
And though in peaceful garb array’d,
And weaponless, except his blade,
His stately mien as well implied,
A high-born heart, a martial pride,
As if a Baron’s crest he wore,
And sheathed in armour trod the shore. (Canto I)

Yet Scott in no way glorifies fighting for its own sake, unless in the pastime of hunting – and even here a noble stag is supposed to be given a fair chance to flee. Indeed, the most “martial” figure of all, Roderick, is rejected by Ellen for his savagery and vengefulness:

…I grant him brave,
But wild as Bracklinn’s thundering wave;
And generous – save vindictive mood,
Or jealous transport, chafe his blood:
I grant him true to friendly band,
As his claymore is to his hand;
But O! That very blade of steel
More mercy for a foe would feel:
I grant him liberal, to fling
Among his clan the wealth they bring,
When back by lake and glen they wind,
And in the Lowland leave behind,
Where once some pleasant hamlet stood,
A mass of ashes slaked with blood. (Canto II)

Although the poem’s immediate subject is the conflict between Fitz-Hugh and Roderick, it is really about the effort of King James to peacefully consolidate his rule. This rule the poet considers legitimate, although tainted by the king’s flaws – a certain rashness of character, and inclination to chase fair maids. His reign has been harmed by ambitious nobles who have falsely denounced Douglas and others to him. The king declares that his purpose is to “watch…o’er insulted laws” and “to right the injured cause.” Thus he made a fair judgment of Douglas:

Calmly we heard and judged his cause,
Our council aided and our laws….
…Bothwell’s Lord henceforth we own
The friend and bulwark of our Throne. (Canto VI)

At the same time, the reconciliation is achieved not only by adherence to law, but by a spirit of loving-kindness native to the king and personified by Ellen, who in some small way turns the heart of each man in the story away from rash warfare. Not that Ellen is a pacifist, as the last lines of this passage suggest:

Her kindness and her worth to spy,
You need but gaze on Ellen’s eye;
Not Katrine [the lake], in her mirror blue,
Gives back the shaggy banks more true,
Than every free-born glance confess’d
The guileless movements of her breast;
Whether joy danced in her dark eye,
Or woe or pity claim’d a sigh,
Or filial love was glowing there,
Or meek devotion pour’d a prayer,
Or tale of injury called forth
The indignant spirit of the North.

The lawfulness and humaneness of the civilizing order are understood to be Christian qualities, contrasted with the rougher ways of the Highlanders, still partly pagan.

A search of articles on The Lady reveals that it was being taught in middle schools in the 1930s; I am not sure exactly when it fell from favor. There is no doubt, though, that neither its content nor its style would have commended it to educators in the later 20th century. Scott’s extolling of traditional virtues like faith, chastity, valor, and honor in a hierarchical world of inherited positions did not reflect the modern egalitarian ideal. The actions of his characters were motivated largely by their given roles and their virtues or lack thereof; there was little of the psychological complexity favored in modern literature. And the flowery, descriptive style with its redundancy and its heavy rhymes was no longer considered to be good writing.

Not only that, Scott was under suspicion of being a source of dangerous ideas – of popularizing a fantasy code of honor that Mark Twain almost literally blamed for the Civil War. The famous passage, from Life on the Mississippi, is quoted in this recent, very derogatory article from The Atlantic:

Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still.

There may be aspects of Scott’s writing that merit Twain’s criticism (which in any case is deliberately exaggerated and probably more applicable to Scott’s imitators); but The Lady contains nothing that can be understood as a call to brash rebellion, let alone to acts of terror. It is true that the portrayal of the loyalty-unto-death bond uniting the members of Clan Alpine remind one the “band of brothers” rhetoric of the South during the Civil War:

Hail to the Chief who in triumph advances!
Honour’d and bless’d be the ever-green Pine!
Long may the tree, in his banner that glances,
Flourish, the shelter and grace of our line! (Canto II)

But Scott ultimately calls for peaceful union under a just ruler, and Roderick in the end pays the price for his ill-considered rebellion (I do not venture here into the question of whether or not that epithet should be applied to the Southern venture). Why should Scott’s message not have continued to be passed on to young Americans, in their English classes and in Classics Illustrated?

Alas, we – or at least our intellectual class – came to believe that Scott’s ideals, and ideas, were not nuanced enough. Scott, said people like Twain onward, portrayed people according to absurd, unlivable ideals instead of as they really are; in doing so, he impeded, or at least failed to help, the progress of the human race. Our real mission was now to transcend boundaries of clan, nation, and race so we could leave behind, once and for all, the ridiculous conflicts which these engendered.

But it was not Scott who lacked subtlety; it was us. He understood the importance of kinship and race, and who controls a narrow swathe of land, and the right of a traditional people to defend their way of life. (Though not supportive of rebellion, he certainly admired the unique virtues of the Highlanders.) He denigrated mercenary soldiers, who “drew not for their fields the sword,” fighting instead for money and adventure. He had a vision of peace between different peoples, but it was peace with mutual respect and with borders, transgressions of which would be punished. And he rightly looked to history as key to understanding the soul of a people, and saw music and poetry as coming from that same soul.

The peaceful life most of us still enjoy in the United States is not the result of our valuing “tolerance” and “diversity.” It is the product of a civilization built up by a linguistically, culturally, and racially homogeneous people, a civilization set up to enforce and propagate a transcendent moral order – just as Scott’s King James sought to do. When we begin to understand this again, Scott will no longer seem so alien to us – and his stories and songs will speak to us once again. We will come, once again, to value and cultivate a sense of personal and national honor. Meanwhile, the true aliens among us, whom we are currently inviting into our society far more quickly than we can “assimilate” them, will become clearly visible for what they are. A nobler and greater culture will become possible.

Notes

(1) The former popularity of the poem is suggested by the fact that it was the source of the last name of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass as well as the source of the Ku Klux Klan’s idea of cross burning (though that practice has little connection to the ritual described in the book). Schubert set a number of songs from The Lady to music, including the famed “Ave Maria;” and the “Boat Song,” also known as “Hail to the Chief,” is the source of the tune played for our President today. It is also the source for Rossini’s opera La donna del lago.

TV, Transitions and New Beginnings

I don’t have a TV at home, and the sheer awfulness of most of it gives me no reason to change that. My wife remarked that she had watched a bit of Ellen and was surprised at how the show wasn’t about anything. I have noticed the same thing. Little stories about rescued animals, vapid conversations with celebrities promoting their latest performance, or ordinary people who get a makeover or something….This was an interesting comment, because I suppose even I, who am not in favor of a Lesbian quota for TV, assumed that the “diversity” Ellen adds would include some element of sophistication. I guess not.

The liberal members of my family like Jon Stewart and some of the dramas, but to me both are like the New York Times – possessing a certain sophistication and craftsmanship but spoiled by their flaunting of their liberal agenda, which they assume all viewers share.

Indeed, even at a young age I was aware of the stupidity of many of the programs – something I picked up from my father. I seem to recall being in the habit of making sarcastic comments about shows as we watched them, not necessarily an endearing habit!

But were Charlie’s Angels and Dallas good shows? No, I think it’s safe to say they were more or less…but I try not to be the smart-mouth anymore. They were entertainment. I myself can truly enjoy something like reruns of The Dukes of Hazzard just because it is so innocent and because it conjures up an America that still was a place I could feel comfortable in.

Things like the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon remind us how much has changed (Michael Jackson’s death is sad too, but in a different way). May they rest in peace. Consider this great sketch from the Carol Burnett Show. This was just ordinary entertainment for ordinary people. But it could not be done today. The silly slapstick is a product of a world of white families consisting of married couples with children, people still largely unselfconscious about their ethnic particularity, people not battered with messages of their own guilt and lack of control over their society, people with family-centered values and lives. For them a joke about sex meant a double-entendre that would make the adults laugh while confusing the kids.

For people who reject the current social order, the alienation one feels with much of the current media can be dispiriting. There are several things we can do, though. One is, of course, to go back to books and to the films and movies of the past. The second is to develop a knack for appreciating some selected parts of our current culture, even though this usually requires learning to ignore some objectionable aspect. The third is to begin setting the groundwork for the culture of our future. I have no pretension of being capable of anything grandiose, but one thing I try to do in this blog is to try to sketch out, at least in the imagination, some ideas about what a healthy culture could be like if it existed in America again.