Human Events‘ Bonfire of the Vanities
(on Human Events see also my earlier post Reality & Satire)
Back to Main
June 4, 2005
Bonfire of the Vanities
Comments
Phyllis Schlafly once wrote a giant biography of Kissinger in which no mention of Cambodia was made.
I think the consensus seemed to be, at the end of the great MoA debate about Strauss, “conservative”/right-wing “philosophy” is basically the antinomy of democracy and material equity; that is, basically, rightwing “philosophy,” if it is honest, is politically platonistic.
Just about every one of those books listed is an attack on elitism.
What idiots, really. What would be the “Human Events” response to Dewey? Lynn Cheney?
“…fucking intellectual halfwits…” –The Fall, “Who makes the Nazis?”
Posted by: slothrop | Jun 4 2005 21:58 utc | 2
slothrop
these people are so transcendentally stupid – that we do not have the language to describe them
when they are in ‘close reading’ mode they read everything except the words. somehow their synapses miss the connection between one word & another
it is why there is never analysis – they are modulating on a monologue only a conservative can comprehend
their deep thinking is nothing but melancholy dressed up as a position paper
their misanthropy suit the times before oldd luther came along
they prefer we wouldn’t read at all
just take a sacrement or two to lead us into kingdom come
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jun 4 2005 22:19 utc | 3
What he says..
These “Human Events” “intellectuals” (as opposed to, what, “Deity Events”) are just caterwauling horseshit for the people who believe in angels.
Posted by: slothrop | Jun 4 2005 22:25 utc | 4
Trancendental stupidity, sometimes known as fundamentalism, offers – as the Dominionist pledge promises – “freedom and justice for all who believe.” The Really Important Question these folks should ask is: Did God got the memo?
Posted by: lonesomeG | Jun 4 2005 22:40 utc | 5
I saw there was a panel of conservative scholars, is that not an oxymoron?
Posted by: dan of steele | Jun 4 2005 23:52 utc | 6
I don’t think I’ve seen a better summary of the philosophies of this odd “conservative” school than this list. What need to come up with criticism, when they’ve composed a text (of “harmful books” no less!) that speaks so well by itself?
If anyone asks me what bothers me about modern authoritarians I’ve now got the perfect answer: “See for yourself”.
Posted by: Anonymous | Jun 4 2005 23:59 utc | 7
Did this group put together a list of their 10 best books of the 19th and 20th Centuries, or do I not want to know?
Posted by: bcf | Jun 5 2005 0:15 utc | 8
Not Bloody Possible
everything’s possible in this best of all possible worlds.
Posted by: DM | Jun 5 2005 0:25 utc | 10
Ha! just actually read the list. Keynes for christ’s sake. And alabama will be amused at the inclusion of Nietzche.
Posted by: DM | Jun 5 2005 0:31 utc | 11
but then these are people who take their holidays in florida with the gangsters & read on the beach either the memoirs of kissinger, nixon or madelaine allbright & get hardons reading tom clancy or nelson demille or for the more nostalgic for the good old times – good old wilbur smith(?) where they read about the old days of apartheid when things were so much simpler – christ they think epistemology is when an evangilical has had too much too drink
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jun 5 2005 0:42 utc | 12
Weird that Hitler made the list, Thought he’d fit right in with this crowd.
Posted by: anna missed | Jun 5 2005 2:01 utc | 13
I agree with anna. I really thought fascism was this “so called” group of scholars modus operandi.
These people hate equality, they hate breaking the business cycle because the “little people” would maintain jobs and actually have the possibility of a better life and they hate secular society with a passion because religion is how you keep the sheeple in line. Am I missing something? Most likely.
They have lust for and can see the new Gilded Age is coming to being.
Bushie says in his blue blood Texas accent: Yee ha, those dum ass sheeple out there in the hustings will know where their place is. We’ll turn the whole darn tooten place into good ol Texas. Corruption will rule and we’ll drag the ones that get out of line behind the pickup, especially if they read those books. Karl Marx? not in my country. We can’t have freedon of thought and we sure can’t have any equality. Only the top one percent and then the sheeple. And rights, hellllll noooo, No lawsuits for damages, tort reform, thats good. Can’t let the sheeple file bankruptsy, heeelll nooo, servitude is the watch word. Oh, and asbestos lawsuits? Naaa. can’t have that. Yee haaa.
Welcome to the right wing world people. The world where books about equality mean shit.
Posted by: jdp | Jun 5 2005 2:25 utc | 14
You mean Harry Potter didn’t make the list?
No Mark Twain? He had some inciteful things to say about religion.
I guess if we were doing the 17th century they would have picked Newton’s Principia; given the choice of Darwin,it seems some people have a diffifult time coping with that “reality thing”. Kinsey? That was a SURVEY not “words to live by”, necessarily.
“Unsafe at any Speed”? That was the one about exploding Ford Pintos, wasn’t it? How DARE Nader with his hate of America quibble over such and insignificant product flaw.
Posted by: tom bartlett | Jun 5 2005 2:31 utc | 15
Annie: Their good list starts with Hayek “The Road to Serfdom” a vile collection of cheap shots, lies, and hysteria, by the man who crowned his career by toasting “economic freedom” in Chile with Pinochet. “Hand me that blowtorch, Augie baby, and let’s teach this commie about the glories of the free market up close and personal.”
Love the Nietzche bit, but what about Martin Luther’s thesis? Didn’t it all start going to hell when the authority of the Holy Church was questioned? How about a denunciation of Abelard, that bastard with his Aristotle – see where it lead? And Giambattista Vico? How about Aristophanes for laughing at Platos’ Laws. No denunciation of Ecclesiastes and its call to live for the day?
And Betty Fredian! My god, what a list. It’s so perfect, even the stuff they leave out is almost certainly due to ignorance. Dewey and Lenin? Where is Benjamin Spock on this list? I demand a recount
Posted by: citizen k | Jun 5 2005 2:48 utc | 16
I didn’t see before that Darwin is in their honorable mention list. You couldn’t make this shit up.
Posted by: citizen k | Jun 5 2005 2:53 utc | 17
About this book list–what a load of rubbish.
With the notable exception of The Communist Manifesto and The Origin Species, almost none of these books played a seminal role in events that were to follow. Nazi destruction certainly didn’t flow from a mass reading of
Mein Kampf (though there is some merit to the influence of “Darwinism” in Germany leading up to the Holocaust.) In fact, the book was widely unread until AFTER Hitler came to power.
There was a Nietzsche cult, but largely around his Zarathustra, not Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche, by the way, self-published all his books–they weren’t best-sellers until the Kaiser issued a copy of Zarathustra to the German infantry during WWI.
The inclusion of Keynes’ book is…well…comical in its ignorance. Centralizing the infrastructure of civil society is now, of course, a bad thing, especially when there is so much money to be made by de-centralizing it and handing over the various sectors to elite friends and relatives.
As goes a secure civil society, so goes liberty; evidently the reason Mill makes the list.
The nod to Ralph Nader is certainly amusing. A book condeming the Chevy Corvair and VW Beetle doesn’t strike me as one of the top ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th century. This must be payback for his anti-corporate political platform, which came about 30 years AFTER the book.
In fact, the list in its entirety, along with the complete absence of evidence tracing a path of causality from book to “harful” effect, tell us so much more about the composers of said list than history:
Evidently this cabinet of ignoramuses, a crack team of cultural critics able to track the textual origins of modern era “harm”, are, presumably for the good of civilization, against feminism, antheism, science, liberalism, and the New Deal. There is a decidely patriarchial, theological resonance in the list.
If these “scholars” (and let’s use the word here in the loosest possible sense) had any real intellectual depth, they might have offered Alexander Kojeve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, a collection of lectures attended in the late 1930s by, among others, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Bataille, Althusser, Queneau, Aron, and Breton. But, of course, Kojeve was a friend of Leo Strauss.
I could go on, but why…?
Posted by: Sloo | Jun 5 2005 3:34 utc | 18
Sloo:
I ha heard of Kojeve, but my hostility to Hegel made me ignore him. But I read in the Internet Encyclopaedia a biographical snippet that seems like something from a conspiratorial dream. Hegel, Althusser, and GATT – now it all makes sense (not really).
Taking over from Alexandre Koyré, he taught a seminar on Hegel from 1933 till 1939. Along with Jean Hyppolite, he was responsible for the serious introduction of Hegel into French thought. His lectures exerted a profound influence (both direct and indirect) over many leading French philosophers and intellectuals – amongst them Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Bataille, Althusser, Queneau, Aron, and Breton. Via his friend Leo Strauss, Kojève’s thought also exerted influence in America, most especially over Allan Bloom and, later, Francis Fukuyama. His lectures on Hegel were published in 1947 under the title Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, appearing in English as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1969). After the Second World War Kojève worked in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs, until his death in 1968. Here he exercised a profound, mandarin influence over French policy, including a role as one of the leading architects of the EEC and GATT. He continued to write philosophy over these years, including works on the pre-Socratics, Kant, the concept of right, the temporal dimensions of philosophical wisdom, the relationship between Christianity and both Western science and communism, and the development of capitalism. Many of these works were only published posthumously.
Posted by: citizen k | Jun 5 2005 4:18 utc | 19
Origin of The Species #18?
Hell, if they knew it existed, does this mean that the waterheads would have put Watson and Crick’s original 1953 Nature paper at #1a?
Because DNA is only a theory, right?
lol…..dan of steele….you beat me to it!
‘conservative scholars’….thats a funny one.
anna…..hitler was pegged because of all that bad PR he got a few years back. it doesn’t mean the don’t believe in his practices.
Posted by: lenin’s ghost | Jun 5 2005 7:01 utc | 21
Ten Books Every Student Should Read in College
by Staff, (Human Events) Posted Jun 1, 2003
1. The Bible
2. The Federalist Papers
3. Democracy in America
……….
Leo Strauss, von Hayek and Orwell get an honorable mention.
Link
Posted by: Noisette | Jun 5 2005 11:07 utc | 23
This is what happens when poor readers mix Orwell and the Federalist Papers.
Madison: The establishment of the writ of habeas corpus, the prohibition of ex post facto laws, and of TITLES OF NOBILITY, to which we have no corresponding provisions in our constitution, are perhaps greater securities to liberty and republicanism than any it contains. The creation of crimes after the commission of the fact, or in other words, the subjecting of men to punishment for things which, when they were done, were breaches of no law, and the practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been in all ages the favourite and most formidable instruments of tyranny. The observations of the judicious Blackstone in reference to the latter, are well worthy of recital. “To bereave a man of life (says he) or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person by secretly hurrying him to goal, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.” And as a remedy for this fatal evil, he is every where peculiarly emphatical in his encomiums on the habeas corpus act, which in one place he calls “the BULWARK of the British constitution.”
And then in practice:
MR. CLEMENT: It certainly is, but this
QUESTION: The person who is locked up,
doesn’t he have a right to bring before some tribunal
himself his own words, rather than have a Government
agent say what was told to him that somebody else
said.
MR. CLEMENT: With respect, Justice
Ginsburg, he has an opportunity to explain it in his
own words. Now, it may not —
QUESTION: During interrogation?
MR. CLEMENT: During interrogation.
QUESTION: I mean, is that your point?
MR. CLEMENT: During interrogation.
During the initial screening. During the screening
in Guantanamo.
QUESTION: How about to a neutral decision
maker of some kind, perhaps in the military? Is that
so extreme that it should not be required?
MR. CLEMENT: No, Justice O’Connor. And
let me say two things. One is when the initial
screening criteria are applied in the field, for all
intents and purposes, that is a neutral decision
maker.
I mean, as I said before, the Army is not
interested in holding people as enemy combatants that
don’t qualify for that and don’t pose a threat. The
second thing I would say, though, is that as I
understand it, the plan on a going-forward basis
reflecting the unique situation of this battle is to
provide individuals like Hamdi, like Padilla, with
the equivalent of the annual review process that’s
laid out in the briefs —
QUESTION: Well, let’s talk about that for
just a moment. What is it that the Government is
saying will be provided?
MR. CLEMENT: Well, Justice O’Connor,
those regulations are still in draft form.
Posted by: citizen k | Jun 5 2005 14:50 utc | 24
Books to read – King Lear – 29 points
GLOUCESTER ‘Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind.
Do as I bid thee, or rather do thy pleasure;
Above the rest, be gone.
Posted by: biklett | Jun 5 2005 17:00 utc | 25
Kojeve is ‘right-wing’ based on his sympathy with Hegel’s later weirdness that the Prussian Burgher was the objectification of Spirit–the end of history. The bourgeoisie had set workers free, as the story goes. Because Freedom occurs as the transformation of Nature by Work, technical progress, for Kojeve, is simply the desire to be recognized. The poor, in the end of history, are like the prototypical Master–passive and uninvolved. The poor are poor because they want to be poor. For Kojeve, the poor are the Masters of the hard-working bourgeois. Class contemnpt here is stunningly vindicated by this fantastic inversion of the slave/mater dialectic. whew. The presumption is the homogeneous bourgeois State has eliminated the ‘specific-differences’ of Master/Slave and has replaced it with the ‘universal recognition of particularity’ which is the individual. This is the same riff Fukayama uses. And other dipshits.
Marx ‘turns Hegel upside down,’ by noting the obvious negation of feudal power with bourgeois capitalism. Makes sense. Is true, comrades. Is true.
Strap Jonah Goldberg to a card table and sodomize him with a copy of Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, New York: Basic Books. (1969), until he figures it out.
Posted by: slothrop | Jun 5 2005 17:09 utc | 26
Another obsevation of the usual rightwing “intellectual” dipshittery is the inability of the rightwing to understand Nietzsche. The Man is curiously expropriated and villified by the right. Can’t they fucking get it right?
All they should do is read:
The Flies in the MarketPlace
Flee, my friend, into thy solitude! I see thee deafened with the noise of the great men, and stung all over with the stings of the little ones.
Admirably do forest and rock know how to be silent with thee. Resemble again the tree which thou lovest, the broad-branched one–silently and attentively it o’erhangeth the sea.
Where solitude endeth, there beginneth the market-place; and where the market-place beginneth, there beginneth also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies.
In the world even the best things are worthless without those who represent them: those representers, the people call great men.
Little, do the people understand what is great–that is to say, the creating agency. But they have a taste for all representers and actors of great things.
Around the devisers of new values revolveth the world:–invisibly it revolveth. But around the actors revolve the people and the glory: such is the course of things.
Spirit, hath the actor, but little conscience of the spirit. He believeth always in that wherewith he maketh believe most strongly–in himself!
Tomorrow he hath a new belief, and the day after, one still newer. Sharp perceptions hath he, like the people, and changeable humours.
To upset–that meaneth with him to prove. To drive mad–that meaneth with him to convince. And blood is counted by him as the best of all arguments.
A truth which only glideth into fine ears, he calleth falsehood and trumpery. Verily, he believeth only in gods that make a great noise in the world!
Full of clattering buffoons is the market-place,–and the people glory in their great men! These are for them the masters of the hour.
But the hour presseth them; so they press thee. And also from thee they
Thus Spake Zarathustra: First Part want Yea or Nay. Alas! thou wouldst set thy chair betwixt For and Against?
On account of those absolute and impatient ones, be not jealous, thou lover of truth! Never yet did truth cling to the arm of an absolute one.
On account of those abrupt ones, return into thy security: only in the market-place is one assailed by Yea? or Nay?
Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what hath fallen into their depths.
Away from the market-place and from fame taketh place all that is great: away from the market-Place and from fame have ever dwelt the devisers of new values.
Flee, my friend, into thy solitude: I see thee stung all over by the poisonous flies. Flee thither, where a rough, strong breeze bloweth!
Flee into thy solitude! Thou hast lived too closely to the small and the pitiable. Flee from their invisible vengeance! Towards thee they have nothing but vengeance.
Raise no longer an arm against them! Innumerable are they, and it is not thy lot to be a fly-flap.
Innumerable are the small and pitiable ones; and of many a proud structure, rain-drops and weeds have been the ruin.
Thou art not stone; but already hast thou become hollow by the numerous drops. Thou wilt yet break and burst by the numerous drops.
Exhausted I see thee, by poisonous flies; bleeding I see thee, and torn at a hundred spots; and thy pride will not even upbraid.
Blood they would have from thee in all innocence; blood their bloodless souls crave for–and they sting, therefore, in all innocence.
But thou, profound one, thou sufferest too profoundly even from small wounds; and ere thou hadst recovered, the same poison-worm crawled over thy hand.
Too proud art thou to kill these sweet-tooths. But take care lest it be thy fate to suffer all their poisonous injustice!
They buzz around thee also with their praise: obtrusiveness is their praise. They want to be close to thy skin and thy blood.
They flatter thee, as one flattereth a God or devil; they whimper before thee, as before a God or devil; What doth it come to! Flatterers are they, and whimperers, and nothing more.
Often, also, do they show themselves to thee as amiable ones. But that hath ever been the prudence of the cowardly. Yea! the cowardly are wise!
They think much about thee with their circumscribed souls–thou art always suspected by them! Whatever is much thought about is at last thought suspicious.
They punish thee for all thy virtues. They pardon thee in their inmost hearts only–for thine errors.
Because thou art gentle and of upright character, thou sayest: “Blameless are they for their small existence.” But their circumscribed souls think: “Blamable is all great existence.”
Even when thou art gentle towards them, they still feel themselves despised by thee; and they repay thy beneficence with secret maleficence.
Thy silent pride is always counter to their taste; they rejoice if once thou be humble enough to be frivolous.
What we recognise in a man, we also irritate in him. Therefore be on your guard against the small ones!
In thy presence they feel themselves small, and their baseness gleameth and gloweth against thee in invisible vengeance.
Sawest thou not how often they became dumb when thou approachedst them, and how their energy left them like the smoke of an extinguishing fire?
Yea, my friend, the bad conscience art thou of thy neighbours; for they are unworthy of thee. Therefore they hate thee, and would fain suck thy blood.
Thy neighbours will always be poisonous flies; what is great in thee–that itself must make them more poisonous, and always more fly-like.
Flee, my friend, into thy solitude–and thither, where a rough strong breeze bloweth. It is not thy lot to be a fly-flap.–
Thus spake Zarathustra.
Posted by: slothrop | Jun 5 2005 17:26 utc | 27
Kojeve’s “latin empire” essay is fascinating and bizzare – it’s shocking, shocking I say, how Spain and Italy did not rush to take up their assigned positions at the foot of France. The essay is a validation of both my contentions that Hegel is intrinsically poisoned by elitism (only the vanguard/enlightened can truly understand the ineffable workings of spirit/economy/history/God) and that the intentions of the mandarins do not correspond to the effects of their policies.
Posted by: citizen k | Jun 5 2005 17:56 utc | 28
What a telling list.
Anything threatening their “grow and proselytise at all costs” (I can’t decide if fundamentalist conservatives remind me more of viruses or cancer cells) is labelled “dangerous”. I shouldn’t be surprised to find that Nader’s Unsafe at any Speed is more “dangerous” to the forces of unchecked corporate greed than Upton Sinclair’s socialist The Jungle… while the latter was definitely more influential (viz., cost them money to correct the things they knew they shouldn’t be doing in the first place), Sinclair isn’t a current thorn in the side of unregulated capitalist gluttony as Nader. But to denounce Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as “dangerous”…! That speaks volumes about where these little Ayn Rands priorities lay.
Judging by what made the list and what is conspicuous by its absence, it is obvious that “dangerous” does not mean those viewpoints which have a deleterious effect upon the lives and psyches of human beings (even from an unchecked capitalist’s point-of-view); We are merely talking about petty personal grudges held by a few morally bankrupt academics. I can see no other reason to say that Betty Friedan or Alfred Kinsey are more “dangerous” to the corporate conservative weltanschauung than Thorstein Veblen (who didn’t even get a nod).
Posted by: Monolycus | Jun 5 2005 18:06 utc | 29
@citizen k,
from your transcript:
“…the plan on a going-forward basis
reflecting the unique situation of this battle…”
on my workplace wall:
POINTY-HAIRED BOSS: I suggest you deal with the issue on a going-forward basis.
DILBERT: Thanks for ruling out time travel. You’re usually not that helpful.
@Sloo,
But they did link cause and effect. Dewey resulted in CLINTON. Engels/Marx resulted in the EEEEVIIILLLLL EMPIRE.
It was only in the honorable mentions, but I KNEW Silent Spring would make the list somewhere. “Shut up and take your poison, you godless, treehugging perverts.”
Posted by: OkieByAccident | Jun 5 2005 18:21 utc | 30
me, I liked the attribution of our current debt DIRECTLY to that evil poor-lover FDR; apparently this administration isn’t responsible for their problems, just saddled with the burden of caring for the unwashed masses. Like Enron?
Posted by: dave | Jun 5 2005 19:24 utc | 31
We must offer our deepest apologies to Dr. Spock. Please stop spinning in your grave, WE haven’t forgotten your efforts on our behalf, even if they have.
And Sir Isaac, Renee & Gallileo, forgive them for they are americans who characteristically have no memories.
Beyond that it’s a helpful list – particularly w/it’s inclusion of Carson & Ehrlich -for it differentiates conservatives from the FaRTs – Fascists, Reactionaries & Theocrats – who’ve taken over and explains the state of the malestream/maelstrom media. Conservatives have philosophical, etc. disagreements. FaRTs Deny Reality Entirely.
Posted by: jj | Jun 5 2005 19:44 utc | 32
Such lists don’t have not much to do with the content of the books – they are just automatic responses, that is the association of some attitude -such as against communism or against free sex- and the most famous putatively important author.
Kinsey is seen as evil if one is against unbridled sex but A. Comfort, who wrote *the Joy of Sex*, a best seller series that surely promoted sexual activity (I remember the drawings – they were sweet), is not.
Kinsey was a forerunner, had research pretensions, is a staple in academe as they always turn to history (those disgusting liberals) whereas Comfort was just a pop. author, now practically forgotten. And even if not forgotten, what is wrong with those books? Nothing. Made good money… on the bestseller lists…were a help to ppl… etc.
I mean people will watch porn movies and read soft porn bodice rippers and buy sex manuals and subscribe to sex advice and porn sites – but Kinsey! Ohhh! Scandalous! Revolting! Because Kinsey is associated with seriousness – and he is singled out as the only one.
Who in the US has read the Communist Manifesto? Give me a break.
The whole point is that the books themselves do not count. It is just buzz….and telling people that one is allowed to say or judge that some books are BAD and should be shunned. (Not burnt quite yet.)
Books banned in the US, see onlinebks:
Link
Posted by: Noisette | Jun 5 2005 21:52 utc | 33
what struck me most about the list was its absurd datedness. to pick just two examples: Betty Friedan, the most radical and/or dangerous feminist author? puh-leeeze. and still whipping poor old Kinsey?
this fixation on very specific, iconified hate-objects from a bygone generation (or two or three generations, witness the FDR hate-cult) seems to me somehow symptomatic… but of what? of the far Right’s opioid dreaming back into “a simpler time,” a golden age that “those people” spoiled? of a failure to engage with current issues and realities, due to investment in said revanchist, sentimental dream?
what I wonder is how (and whether) the Right manages to make these dusty old names at all relevant to their younger members. the average undergraduate (in my experience) today would look at you blankly and say “Angela Davis? who’s that?” and if a film had not been recently made about him and publicised by some silly rightwing fulminating, would say the same about Kinsey. how on earth does the Right get its own up-and-coming young turks to take seriously this kind of penny-museum, glass-cabinet display of ancient grudges?
btw Noisette, I have often suspected that what the hardcore wingnuts never forgave Kinsey for was his revelation of survey results indicating the scope of homosexual love and sex among American males. this was his Great Thought Crime: he blew out of the water the happy little Norman Rockwell illustration of a uniformly straight-white-male Andy-of-Mayberry America. he made America less straight, less simple than they needed it to be (ideologically, emotionally, religiously, politically) and for that he had to be reviled and if possible discredited. remember the attacks on his reputation, imputations of child molestation, yada yada? Carson of course was also subjected to vicious attacks after SS was published…
The reason they hate Kinsey is because they think his data was bad and they think he was the first “authority” who made it okay to be homosexual…therefore, he goes against their agenda of having all of their queens live in the closet (paging Scott McClellan, paging Ken Mehlman, paging…how many of them have been outed recently who are so anti-gay??…because they hate themselves, no doubt.
If it weren’t for Kinsey, in other words, we’d all still be traditionalists (which, of course, means doing it doggie style, for their information.)
The Kinsey Institute’s library is privately funded so that they can’t get challenges from people like those making lists like these.
Posted by: fauxreal | Jun 5 2005 22:14 utc | 36
yes DeA. There are people who remember that. And there is the difference (though there are so many others…) with the example I dredged up – Alex Comfort, who discussed and prescribed cosy friendly sex between heterosex couples and went on about technique.
Posted by: Noisette | Jun 5 2005 22:21 utc | 37
Difficult to decide if the characteristic is datedness — the books have slipped into the past, are old hat hates! – Or if the defining characteristic is their seriousness, which is to be forbidden, given up entirely. Homosexual sex, or the opression of women by men (Friedan, though she changed her mind in recent years..) are not topics that are palatable, if exposed and then discussed with some weight.
Jerry Springer showing teen age whores and their 50 year old pimps on the Tee Vee is fine though – that is just life, or people doing what they want. Brutish and disgusting is accepted – any analysis is not, even if Kinsey and Friedan are hardly spectacular examples of incisive insight.
Posted by: Noisette | Jun 5 2005 22:32 utc | 38
&in any case the great books are written by ordinary people living through extraordinary times
& these ‘book’, these fools will never be able to read because they have never had the means to understand them
as the elites would like to hide the suffering & the misery they perpetuate that would also like to conceal the rich stories that come from their victims
i work with those victims every day
& one word from them is worth more than a series of seminars from fuckwits like coulter & her endless crew of p j o’rourkes. they are not worth the bile in my body. they are nothing
they cannot know of the words of the togoloese wood carver, or of the tortured man from conakry, they cannot know the ex major from the polish army, they cannot know the breton who speaks as if to endless space. no they cannot know them – will never know them
theirs, that is, the disinherited posess passion, possess truth & are the only possessors of real beauty – even a clown like st augustine understood that. so too bruno & vico. & was not that the gnostic enterprise – to forever roam the escoteric to find the simple & elemenal truths
only the dispossessed know them
i am tired as a man can be in the face of the onslaught of stupidity of our time. yes the bastards have won & not happy to win they bring us all to the filth & the mire. buit their filth & mire is not the pit – it is the infinite lakes of vanity they look at presuming themselves godheads even if they possess such ungodly names as thomas friedmann, or wolf blitzer
their thinkers like their thinking is inane
the do not deserve the faustian deals of a kojeve & even he understood power, power as it is expressed by a modern state is an impoverished thing, yeats ragged coat on a stick
i do not envy them, their lives or their booklists
they are as far from truth as they can possibly be
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jun 5 2005 23:48 utc | 39
RGiap: Ever read “The Enormous Room” by EE Cummings?
Okie by Accident: Ratbert-ocracy am us.
Posted by: citizen k | Jun 6 2005 1:28 utc | 40
I forgot the one true test: what music do they listen to? That says a lot. Perhaps says more than knowing what they read.
Posted by: slothrop | Jun 6 2005 1:28 utc | 41
@slothrop
“what music do they listen to? That says a lot. Perhaps says more than knowing what they read.”
I disagree, but I am sure that the powers-that-be would have liked for us to believe that is so when they leaked George the Younger’s dance mix earlier this year (“He’s so in-touch! He downloads Van Morrison just like we do!”). The music industry, even more than publishing, strangles their product until it is palatable to, and only to, that mythical statistical construct we call “the lowest common denominator”. When a musical artist has something worthwhile to say, they are, more often than not, not marketed commercially.
Posted by: Monolycus | Jun 6 2005 2:43 utc | 42
A really high percentage of conservatives listen to junk. Really. Should do a longitudinal study. Broadway tunes and toby keith.
Posted by: slothrop | Jun 6 2005 3:03 utc | 43
Nothing wrong with Broadway tunes from where I sit at this end of the piano bar. ‘Cats’ excluded.
Sad thing is they probably dug the same music we did but decided it was a good thing to be just another brick in the wall.
Posted by: biklett | Jun 6 2005 4:08 utc | 45
Slothrop: You are welcome to join my new organization the Popular Front for Sending Toby Keith to Mosul Now. Our motto: “YOU kick that ass, Toby, we’ll take care of the home front.”
Posted by: citizen k | Jun 6 2005 5:06 utc | 46
Purblind fools, these Human Events “scholars”! They give us a list of ten books that they consider “dangerous” to English-language readers. Of those ten books, four are actually written in German, one in Chinese, and one in French! Don’t these idiots know that books achieve their real power, and thereby become truly dangerous, only in their mother tongues, and that their power and danger, in translation, are only rumors–suggestive, certainly, of possible danger, but hardly deranging in themselves (and this elementary fact can be shown to hold for the Hebrew and Greek scriptures, not to mention the poets and philosophers)? No, I’m afraid they don’t know this, which is why their “dangerous” books are so tame, so safe, and so harmless. And if these lightweight, tone-deaf whiners have any influence at all over the reading lists of our schools and colleges, then it’s no surprise at all that our students are so often clueless, toothless and sightless.
Posted by: alabama | Jun 6 2005 5:07 utc | 47
Alabama: You think that the King James bible lacks power and resonance?
Posted by: citizen k | Jun 6 2005 6:11 utc | 48
I find this issue rather uninvolving. Let the braying asses rail on. Will it matter? I doubt it. You might as well as them “What is your name?” “What is your quest?” “What is your favorite color?”
Posted by: Lupin | Jun 6 2005 6:15 utc | 49
No, citizen K, I do not. But the Greek of the Pauline epistles created Christianity, and that’s the stuff of revolution. It’s dangerous. The King James Bible (really the Tyndale Bible of 1535, itself a translation of Luther’s German bible) captured enough of that original “rumor” to instigate the eruption of our own revolutionary scripture (call it “Shakespeare”), and we’ve been swimming in the “danger” of that revolution for a while now. Point this out to the vermin of Human Events , however, and their eyes (their non-existent eyes) will instantly glaze over…..
Posted by: alabama | Jun 6 2005 7:15 utc | 50
Alabama: I’m no christian (not that there is anything wrong with it), but AME preachers in the Deep South generate a lot of sparks from KJ. Also, if you read Tom Paine, you will see KJ electricity.
Posted by: citizen k | Jun 6 2005 7:28 utc | 51
Yes, citizen k, I agree. But what they make of the KJ Bible is mediated through and through by “Shakespeare” (explicilty so in Paine). It’s complicated, certainly. There a wicked smart (and very funny} story by Rudyard Kipling–perhaps the last story he wrote–called “Proofs of Holy Writ,” in which Kipling demonstrates that Shakespeare had a hand in writing the KJ Bible. And if Human Events had placed the KJ Bible at the top of their “most dangerous books” list, I’d see the sense of that decision (after all, Henry VIII had Tyndale himself burned at the stake).
Posted by: alabama | Jun 6 2005 8:00 utc | 52
Alabama: Makes sense. Efforts like this one from Human Events remind me of Sartre’s essay on anti-semitism, where as I remember it he locates the bitterness of losers who know they are losers as the root of bigotry and nationalism. These functional illiterates and 3rd rate hacks like Gingrich and Horowitz cast themselves as heirs to the Intellectual Tradition of the West in an effort to disguise their lack of talent and accomplishment. Not sure if I buy it, but it fits the Fred N. theme above. “Conservative scholars” attacking Darwin, Dewey, Marx, Keynes, and “feminism” like Julius Streicher critiquing “Jewish physics”.
Posted by: citizen k | Jun 6 2005 8:25 utc | 53
http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/misc/holywrit.html
pretty good.
Posted by: citizen k | Jun 6 2005 8:50 utc | 54
@alabama & citizen k
Thanks for the Kipling cite. That was an inspiring read.
Posted by: citizen | Jun 6 2005 15:43 utc | 55
Ditto. it’s a nice language, now and again.
made me ponder also: which comes first, writing or speech?
Posted by: slothrop | Jun 6 2005 16:24 utc | 56
Alabama provided the cite, I just provided the google. Kipling was a strange duck indeed.
Posted by: citizen k | Jun 6 2005 18:41 utc | 57
A small point struck me: they credit Darwin with a book he never wrote, “Origin of the Species”. Which species? The short title is “On the origin of species”. I’d put it down to simple ignorance, but the altered title sugests a common misconception of evolutionary theory: that evolution is supposed to be going somewhere, has the goal of producing humans. [U]The[/U] species.
In fact, I think there are only a couple of paragraphs about humans in the whole book. Darwin is one of the thinkers who have pushed our planet and species further and further from the center of the known universe.
Posted by: Oliver T. | Jun 6 2005 22:02 utc | 58
Actually, if the editors of Human Events want to go back in time and most efficiently thwart my (and many others’) delelopment into a cynical, openminded, skeptical, humanistic, treehugging snark artist, they need only go back to the late 1950’s, blow up the offices of Mad magazine, and kill William Gaines.
@citizen k,
You are welcome to join my new organization the Popular Front for Sending Toby Keith to Mosul Now…
I’m in. I’m so incredibly sick of Toby fucking Keith. He’s turning into a local real estate/restaraunt magnate, and the local press just fellates him. His damn commemorative banner hangs in our local airport alongside people of actual substance (Gordon Cooper, Woody Guthrie, Maria Tallchief).
Never thought it could get worse than Garth Brooks.
Posted by: OkieByAccident | Jun 7 2005 4:00 utc | 59
Ode to Toby Keith.
—————————–
Hey all you Ayrabs and towelhead trash
Uncle Sam’s gonna kick your ass
better start running get some fright and fear
here we stay, the Soldiers of the Rear
We’ll put them magnets on our SUVs
and high five bomb blasts on Fox TV
We’re the tough tough dudes far behind the lines
we’d go ourselves, but who has the time?
we’ll send some suckers to terminate your third world ass
for charging us too much for a gallon of gas
we got cowboy hats and don’t know how to ride
we got combat boots and we’re full of pride
We’re power point Rangers and suburban Seals
watch out motherfucker, we’re the real damn deal
Soldiers of the Rear Oh Jesus we pray
bring the big war on, but keep it far away.
Posted by: citizen k | Jun 7 2005 16:32 utc | 61