“Mistah Kurtz – he dead.”
T.S. Eliot chose that line from Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness as the epigram for his poem “The Hollow Men.”
Oh, come on, you know:
The novel, and the poem, about the terminal termitic decay of what we laughingly call “civilization,” and the “hollow men” who (barely) populate Western society?
With all that scarecrow and “straw men” and trophy-heads-on-pikes imagery?
“This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a wimper” and all that?
Or maybe you don’t.
And you don’t want to know, either. Not anything.
“What difference does it make?“
In a world where “Benghazi was a long time ago,” expressing what used to be called “common knowledge,” or asking what once was considered “a normal question,” is verboten.
You see:
Jason Collins is gay, therefore Jason Collins has always been gay.
That he’s gay is everybody’s business, but it’s nobody’s business that John Maynard Keynes was.
Get it?
You’d better.
A quick review:
A mediocre basketball player named Jason Collins — I don’t follow sports, but from what I can make out, his nickname is “Who?” — was declared a national hero for telling the world he discovered a cure for cancer likes to have sex with other men.
Veteran broadcaster and print pundit Howard Kurtz dared to wonder aloud what, if anything, Collins’ long-time (female) fiance knew or thought about this apparently earth-shattering revelation.
Oooops! Kurtz tossed a Venus-symbol shaped monkey wrench into the media machinery, which had been busily manufacturing a Inspirational Story of Courage AND Bravery, probably while this very music was playing.
For daring to disrupt the narrative, Kurtz was “let go” from The Daily Beast.
(A note to any newly literate “savages” who happen to be reading this: Our great society is so awfully advanced that “being let go” by a “daily beast” is no longer considered a cause for celebration…)
And then, as BreitbartNews reported:
CNN’s Howard Kurtz Hosts Show Trial Against Himself Over Collins Error
Also? MSNBC sports commentator Chris Broussard was disciplined for saying, on television, in reference to Collin’s revelation, that the Bible calls homosexual acts sinful.
That used to be called “a fact.”
Broussard got off easy, actually.
Up here in Canada, a street preacher spent twelve years in court for handing out a flyer that said the same thing.
The ruling elite will not accept any deviation from their narrative.
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I forget to mention that Jason Collins is black, and that supposedly makes him super-dooper-pooper brave.
According to white people.
Black people, though?
Here are a few comments by African-American conservative commentators as curated at the indispensable BookerRising website.
Few of these comments ever made it into the papers, what with all the attention being paid to how evil Howard Kurtz and Chris Broussard are:
“Jason Collins wants to
take advantage of the significant financial opportunities and name recognition that will come his way now that he’s the first major-league, active athlete to come out as gaywishes to live a more authentic life.”“Unlike Jackie Robinson, he’s a mediocre baller & he’s not a pioneer”
“Chris Broussard was the really courageous one, not Jason Collins”
“This (formerly) down-low brother was a liar, so he’s not a role model”
“Why did Obama think that congratulating Collins was a national emergency?”
“Who is this irrelevant negro?”
None of these people were fired from their big media jobs, because, come to think of it, most of them don’t have big media jobs.
Which seems kind of, I dunno, racist or something.
Incidentally?
Here’s how Joseph Conrad described Heart of Darkness:
A wild story of a journalist who becomes manager of a [trading] station in the interior and makes himself worshipped by a tribe of savages. Thus described, the subject seems comic, but it isn’t.
Just thought I’d put that out there.
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Anyhow, next head to get stuck on a stick?
That of historian and author of Civilization: The West and the Rest, Niall Ferguson.
Other people, like Jonah Goldberg, have already covered this “controversy” admirably:
Ferguson suggested that because John Maynard Keynes was gay, effete, and childless he might have lacked concern for posterity.
After all, Keynes famously proclaimed ”in the long run we’re all dead.” In a nigh-upon hysterical and terribly written item, Tom Kostigen of Financial Advisor says Ferguson took “gay-bashing to new heights.” (…)
Ferguson has offered an abject and total apology (…)
Felix Salmon of Reuters tweeted in response to Ferguson’s apology, ”It’s conceivable that Niall Ferguson managed to rescue his career with this” (…)
But as Goldberg goes on to point out in admirable detail, Ferguson’s hate-speech cwazy-tawk “theory” about Keynes — who big-government liberals still worship as a kind of god — is one that distinguished, educated scholars have been openly writing and talking about for some time.
To cite just one example among many that Goldberg dug up with a little help from Nexis, here’s a 1986 article in that diabolical hotbed of gay-hate, the Harvard Business Review:
John Maynard Keynes would have done a great service if he had begun The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money with the disclosure that he was a Bloomsbury aesthete and a practicing homosexual. He could have explained how he and friends did not believe in self-denial or consider that they had any obligation to posterity. (An historian has pointed out that Keynes’s famous remark, “In the long run we are all dead,” is easy to make if you have no children and don’t want any.) Perhaps as a result we might have lower federal deficits.
And here’s Mark Steyn:
In his pithiest maxim, John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20th century social-democratic state and the patron saint of “stimulus”, offered a characteristically offhand dismissal of any obligation to the future: “In the long run we are all dead.” The Greeks are Keynesians to a man: The mob is rioting for the right to carry on suspending reality until they’re all dead. After that, who cares?
Of course, our ruling elite is still very much alive, and awfully busy.
Who says American manufacturing is dead? The nation has cornered the international market on making amends. Apologizing is a thriving industry. Call it Big Sorry.
Or maybe a new twist on Keynesian economics:
Burying people who dig up trash.
In the long run, we’re all dead anyhow, right?
(As Keynes, the one-time Director of the Eugenics Society, liked to say.)
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A penny for the Old Guy
That’s the second epigram of Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:
Guy Fawkes was convicted of trying to blow up King James I in 1605 by stashing gunpowder underneath the Parliament building. The incident is known as the “Gunpowder Plot.” But Fawkes and the gunpowder were discovered before the plan went off, and Fawkes gave up the names of his co-conspirators under torture.
To celebrate Guy Fawkes Day, English children ask for money to fund the explosions of their straw effigies of Fawkes, so they say, “A penny for the guy?”
You probably know more about Guy Fawkes than you ever thought you would, thanks to Occupy and Anonymous, who’ve appropriated the stylized Guy Fawkes mask first seen in the graphic novel V for Vendetta.
Before all that, before 9/11 even, blogger Orrin Judd wrote an essay about Eliot’s poem:
I wouldn’t pretend to understand all of this, nor exactly what it is he’s trying to say, but I do know what it says to me. I take it as an indictment of Modern man and the failure of confidence that characterizes us.
The comparison of the sound of modern voices to “rat’s feet over broken glass” aptly dismisses all of the psycho babble and faux spirituality of the age, all of modernity’s futile effort to replace the beliefs that have been discarded.
Also? “The Hollow Men” begins to end with this verse:
Here we go ’round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go ’round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.
In the original folk tune, the children “go ’round” a “mulberry bush.”
A symbol of spring, fertility, renewal.
Eliot’s substitute, the prickly pear, is meant to connote the opposite:
Infertility, impotence, sterility — a barren desert, all that remains of our “great” civilization.
You know, the one where gay “marriage” and intolerant intolerance and non-diverse diversity and victim-heroes and other tail-eating-snakes are held up as totems of “progress.”
Or else.
Where “men” — hollow men, straw men — apologize for saying “that which must not be said.”
Where an African-American doctor who saves lives is vilified while another is mostly ignored, even though he kept dead baby parts in jars, as trophies.
Where, in the long run, we’re all Mr. Kurtz.
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