Category Archives: Reactionary Entertainment

by

The Esoteric Traditionalism of Matewan

A guest post by commenter Bill:

Back when I was a neo-con doofus, the movie Matewan was a guilty pleasure. For those unfamiliar, Matewan is a fictionalized depiction of the events surrounding the Battle of Matewan. This was a violent confrontation, set off by a union organizing drive, in Matewan, WV between members of the United Mine Workers and the Stone Mountain Coal Company. One of the many intellectual benefits of moving to the real right is appreciating this film without guilt.

Seen through one lens, the movie is straight-up socialist agit-prop. The protagonist is a former Wobbly, career labor activist, Joe Kenehan. The antagonists are a couple of drunken, degenerate, dishonest pinkerton goons. The movie is well-made and visually beautiful, but its plotting is crude and predictable with the socialist Kenehan as improbably angelic as the pinkertons are demonic. The Kenehan character is boring to watch and difficult to identify with.

So, how does the movie draw our sympathies to the UMW’s side? There is only one technique on offer. We are presented, over and over, with the clash between real, organic, traditional cultures on the one side and the cold, empty, but overwhelmingly powerful forces of modernity on the other. Modernity is played by, first, the railroad, and, second, the pinkertons.

Early in the movie, the pinkertons get off the train in Matewan and find, sitting at the train station, a pretty young woman. It seems that she spends her days watching the trains come and go. This seemingly stock character is not. Normally, Hollywood portrays this woman very sympathetically as a visionary and dreamer, a woman “too big for this small town.” Here, she is portrayed as empty, stupid, and essentially autistic. Naturally, the pinkertons are very unpleasant to her, but the interaction comes off less as the pinkertons victimizing her than three people failing to interact meaningfully because there is an empty space where
that-which-interacts should be. They who come from the railroad and she who hankers after it.

Later, the pinkertons go to a Sunday service at the local Baptist assembly and drunkenly laugh through “There is Power in the Blood.” Again, what one comes away with is not so much hatred for the pinkertons but horror at the contrast between the evident fullness, community, and rootedness of the townspeople and the yawning, tinny, broken emptiness of the pinkertons.

In another scene, Kenehan recounts his time during the First World War in prison with some Mennonites. He describes with evident awe watching, day after day, as the Mennonites pried the buttons off their prison-issued clothes, sure in the knowledge that they would be punished but surer in the knowledge that their traditions require that they take the buttons off.

In a climactic scene, the strikers (now consisting of blacks & Italian immigrants brought under false pretenses by the company to break the strike, along with the indigenous Appalachians) are at
their campsite. They are about to be dispossessed of what little they have left by the pinkertons. From nowhere arrive a bunch of Hillbillies who chase off the pinkertons via a show of force (evidently, they have been harboring a longstanding grudge against the company). As the pinkertons leave, one comments on a
Hillbilly’s outdated firearm, asking if it was used in the Spanish War. No, he replies, in the War Between the States.

One could go on in this vein. The case the movie makes for the UMW could not be more clear. The union will protect your culture and way of life. The company will destroy it. Whether this is actually true in the real world is of no moment. The sales-job presupposes traditionalism. As Bonald points out in one of his posts, Hollywood sometimes makes traditionalist movies by accident. We are so off their radar screen that they sometimes stumble accidentally into our territory—because we are right about how humans are, humans respond to traditionalist themes.

by

Repost: Ten Reasons to Legalize ILA

I originally published this post on my now-defunct blog Dispatches from the North in January of 2012.

  1. To reduce the prison population and ease police workloads. As of 2008, more than 175,000 Americans were behind bars for ILA. Statistics for other countries with anti-ILA laws are similar. Anti-ILA laws thus put a tremendous strain on both prisons and law enforcement, giving them less time and fewer resources to deal with other, more important problems, such as poverty and racism.
  2. To combat discrimination. In many countries, those who have been convicted of ILA are forbidden from voting or running for political office. Furthermore, tremendous social stigma is attached to ILA, reducing practitioners’ opportunities in housing and employment, among other things. Laws against ILA are also often used to legitimize institutional racism: In the United States, a disproportionate number of people convicted of ILA are Hispanic or African-American, and again, the statistics for other countries are similar. We believe that the legalization of ILA should be complemented with anti-discrimination laws, mandatory sensitivity training for police and public servants, and the introduction of an ILA History Month aimed at making society more inclusive of ILA and its practitioners. Continue reading →
by

A tale of two bishops

I

Glorifying God, leaking into the world the love that he leaks into us through the wounds and breaches and gaps of our own lives, is a severely practical and down to earth activity.

In that sense we do in the world what God does in us. We receive His love where we are vulnerable and weak, and lose sight of it when we claim strength and power. Christians reach to the jagged edges of our society, and of the world in general. Food distribution, places for rough sleepers, debt counselling, credit unions, community mediation, support for ex‐offenders, support for victims of crime, care for the dying, valuing those who have no economic contribution to make, or are too weak to argue for their own value. All this is the daily work of the church, which goes on every day and everywhere. We leak out into the world the love that God leaks into us.

The above bit of revoltingly banal, worldly shlock comes to us from the Christmas sermon of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who was enthroned today as head of the Anglican Communion in a ceremony that looked like this:

Continue reading →

by

Reclaiming Beauty

Fellow orthospherean Kidist Paulos Asrat has a new project, with a new site: Reclaiming Beauty. She’s just gotten started, and already it’s well worth a look. Those who are interested in architecture and design will find it particularly interesting.

And sad. Our civilization was once much more beautiful than it has been since the Second World War. Is not the sheer ugliness and discomfort of modernism in design a sufficient indication of modernism’s philosophical wickedness and falsity?

+++++++++++++

Synchronicity alert: I went over to Kidist’s site to grab the URL so I could paste it supra, and found that she had just posted there my Amazon review of physicist John Barrow’s book on beauty, wherein I make a point parallel to the argument in my second paragraph above:

… animal minds and bodies subjected to natural selection are in big trouble if they embody propositions about the world, and therefore about the appropriate way to behave, that are in any important way essentially wrong.

by

Doxacon

Fellow orthospherean Joseph of Arimathea sends along word that this coming July, our own Professor Dr. Tom Bertonneau will be a featured speaker at Doxacon, a convention for Christian fans and writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy, sponsored by the Protection of the Holy Mother of God Orthodox Church in Falls Church. Be there and be … spherical?

Joke! I’m sure the discussions at Doxacon will be absolutely fascinating. From Out of the Silent Planet to Count to a Trillion, from Last and First Men to Up Jim River, those trad Christianist geeks will be tripping the light fantastic. In a manner of speaking only, I hasten to add; few things could be more disturbing than the sight of science fiction fans dancing …

I’m putting this in the Civilizational Twilight category, because almost all science fiction and fantasy involves the adventures of a hero in an age that has Fallen from its halcyon days of yore – this Fall being the generator of the Problems the hero must solve. Meaning that science fiction and fantasy are *essentially* traditionalist.

This should hardly suprise us. After all, *reality* is essentially traditionalist, no? That’s why there are regularities in nature, so that there can be science, so that there can be … science fiction.

by

Reactionary Composer of the Week: Ralph Vaughan Williams

When I talk about classical music with people, they sometimes ask me who is my all-time favorite composer. I never quite know what to answer, but the name I usually mention is that of Ralph Vaughan Williams. (The “Ralph,” by the way, is pronounced “Rayf,” as with the actor Ralph Fiennes.)

You may or may not have heard of Vaughan Williams before—he’s considered a national treasure in the UK, particularly in England, but is much less well known on my corner of the continent—but even if you haven’t, chances are good that you’ve heard his music. For example, his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis for—get this—two string orchestras and string quartet has been used in several film scores. Many of Vaughan Williams’s works have a nationalist tint, and often take their inspiration from English folk music and Tudor-age hymns and dances. (Apart from composing, Vaughan Williams also did groundbreaking work in the collection and study of English folk songs, and was one of the editors of the first English Hymnal.)

I can pinpoint the moment Vaughan Williams became one of my favorite composers Continue reading →

by

Reactionary Composer of the Week: Stefania de Kenessey

Today’s reactionary composer, Stefania de Kenessey, is a recent discovery of mine. De Kenessey is a Hungarian currently living in the United States, and is the founder of the Derriere Guard, an affiliation of anti-modernist artists whose best known member is the author Tom Wolfe. While I’ve heard de Kenessey’s highly tonal music described as “neoclassical,” it differs in some very important ways from the compositions of the original neoclassicists, an early to mid-20th century school whose most notable representatives were Igor Stravinsky and the group of French composers known as Les Six. (No bonus points for correctly guessing how many members Les Six had.) For one, it seems completely free of the winking, self-conscious irony typical of the original neoclassicists. For another, de Kenessey is not, as many of the original neoclassicists were accused of being, a dry and unemotional composer. Her music is earnestly lyrical, as neoromantic as it is neoclassical. The name that kept popping into my head as I listened to this CD of her chamber music was Schubert’s; in particular, I hear strong echoes of the first movement of the “Death and the Maiden” quartet in parts of the first movement of the clarinet quintet Shades of Darkness. My one major complaint about the music on the CD (which is my only exposure to de Kenessey so far) is that I found it a little tiring in large doses, as she has a tendency to overuse certain motifs and ideas. (To see what I mean, listen back-to-back to Shades of Darkness‘s “Death and the Maiden”-ish opening and the very beginning of the piano trio Traveling Light, or compare the first entry of the clarinet in that same movement to the first entry of the flute in The Passing.) I couldn’t find excerpts from the CD on YouTube, but on Amazon and ClassicalArchives.org, you can listen to some free samples and buy full MP3s for a pittance.

by

Time for another levity break!

Q: What do Leonid Brezhnev, Sherlock Holmes, and the Chinese have in common?

A: They’re all regular characters in the fount of humor that is Russian jokes.

Not jokes about Russians, that is, though there are plenty of those as well, but jokes from Russia, or anekdoty. Wikipedia has a good selection with some background information. Some of them rely on puns or cultural references that don’t translate well, but most are hilarious even to a non-Russian with no particular familiarity with Russian culture. (Be warned, by the way, that many of them also are not family-friendly by any stretch of the imagination.) I especially like the older ones poking fun at Communism. Here’s a Stalin joke from the page about Russian political jokes:

Continue reading →

by

Reactionary Composer of the Week: Ottorino Respighi

On the last RCOTW post before the feature went into hiatus, a commenter questioned whether any of the composers I’d highlighted could really be described as “reactionary.” His reasoning seemed to be that if we apply the same definition of “reactionary” to the arts as we do to politics, morality, and metaphysics, the only composer worthy of the term would be one who had returned to writing exclusively Gregorian chants. (My own views on what constitutes a traditionalist or reactionary aesthetic are a bit more lenient, and close to Larry Auster’s. Scroll down to his reply to Karl D. to see the post I’m talking about.) Today’s reactionary composer, the Italian Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), didn’t quite go that far, but he certainly came closer than most, basing many of his works on the church modes of the Middle Ages and Renaissance rather than the major-minor tonality of Classicism, Romanticism, and the better part of the Baroque, and sometimes even using actual Gregorian chants as thematic material.

Respighi is by far best known for his “Roman Trilogy” of orchestral suites, but he composed many other works as well. Here, I want to highlight the final movements of his Concerto in Modo Misolidio (Concerto in the Mixolydian Mode) for piano and orchestra and his Concerto Gregoriano for violin and orchestra. Aside from illustrating what I said about Respighi’s use of church modes and Gregorian chant, these movements also show that the man could really write a barnstorming finale–both have the complexity of good classical music and the sweep and emotional directness of film music.

Concerto in Modo Misolidio – Passacaglia (Allegro energico). Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, Howard Griffiths (conductor), Konstantin Scherbakov (piano).

Concerto Gregoriano – Alleluia (Allegro energico). Performers not named in description.

by

Of Peasants and Playwrights

This piece was originally published in the Winter 2011 issue of the Quarterly Review.

The Dano-Norwegian writer and intellectual Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754) was in many ways a typical figure of the Enlightenment. A lawyer by training, Holberg made his living as a prolific writer of essays, poems, and scientific works, many of which espoused the rationalism and deism of the age. In Scandinavia, though, he is best remembered for his plays, the majority of which he wrote during an extremely productive period between 1722 and 1725, near the middle of his career.

But although Holberg was a product of his time, he was also, like most pre-Romantic artists, innately and instinctively conservative. This is revealed most clearly in his plays, and particularly in his crowning achievement, the comedy Jeppe på bjerget (Jeppe of the Hill), which remains a cornerstone in the repertoire of Nordic theatres. Although the play is set in the Denmark of Holberg’s time, it takes its plot from an old story found, among other places, in the Arabian Nights and Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.

Early in the play, the eponymous Jeppe, a work-shy peasant with an unhealthy fondness for alcohol, falls asleep in a ditch after drinking away his wife’s grocery money, and is found there by a bored Baron and his party. They decide to play a trick on him, and take the still-sleeping peasant to the Baron’s estate, where they wash him, clothe him, and put him in the Baron’s bed. When Jeppe wakes up, the servants act as if he is the Baron, telling him that his life as peasant was nothing but a dream. (An unlikely explanation, yes, but this is a Moliére-style farce.) After a spell of fear and confusion, the boorish Jeppe grows accustomed to his new life, eating, drinking and tormenting his servants with greater vigour than the real Baron would ever dream of.

A few summers ago, I attended a staging of Jeppe… at the Norwegian National Theatre in Oslo. The staging was a modernized, vaguely politicized one of the sort so popular with provincial directors who want to imitate the things they’ve heard they’re doing in Berlin or Paris. Not for this director the prim historical correctness of powdered wigs and lace: instead, the Baron was dressed as a modern-day businessman — or rather, an over-the-top caricature of a modern-day businessman, complete with leather briefcase, designer suit, Brylcreemed hair, a gaggle of obsequious personal assistants, and the day’s copy of the Wall Street Journal tucked safely under one arm. (Jarringly, Jeppe still wore the rags of an 18th-century peasant.)

The implication was obvious: Jeppe… serves to highlight the cruel and arbitrary rule of the aristocracy of the past, and, with a little scenographic tweaking, the aristocracy of the present. In his wisdom, Holberg must have predicted the concept of class warfare, though it only emerged long after his death; after all, good historical determinists, be they Whigs or Marxists, know that the entirety of human history has been nothing but an inevitable march towards enlightenment and liberation. Men of past generations were simply stupider versions of us, and the astuteness of their ideas can be judged by their similarity to ours.

But this notion is folly. In the pre-Marxist age of Jeppe of the Hill, the realities of social station were often seen, not as arbitrary and unfair constructs, but rather as impersonal and unstoppable forces of an almost primeval nature. Poverty was not an intolerable and unnecessary evil, but, like death or taxes, a tragic and unavoidable fact of life, the moral and social implications of which depended on the amount of dignity with which it was borne by those it afflicted. There were those who sought to make the best of their plight, and there were those who preferred to surrender to laziness, self-medication, or self-deception. The feckless Jeppe, who is a figure of fun among his fellow peasants as well as the aristocracy, is a caricature of the latter. The play’s opening monologue, delivered by Jeppe’s shrewish wife Nille, sums up his personality well:

“NILLE. I hardly believe there’s such another lazy lout in all the village as my husband, it’s as much as I can do to get him up in the morning by pulling him out of bed by the hair. The scoundrel knows to-day is market-day, and yet he lies there asleep at this hour of the morning. The pastor said to me the other day, ‘Nille, you are much too hard on your husband; he is and he ought to be the master of the house.’ But I answered him, ‘No, my good pastor! If I should let my husband have his way in the household for a year, the gentry wouldn’t get their rent nor the pastor his offering, for in that length of time he would turn all there was in the place into drink. Ought I let aman rule the household who is perfectly ready to sell his belongings and wife and children and even himself for brandy?’ The pastor had nothing to say to that, but stood there stroking his chin. The bailiff agrees with me, and says, ‘My dear woman, pay no attention to the pastor. It’s in the wedding-service, to be sure, that you must honor and obey your husband, but it’s in your lease, which is more recent than the service, that you shall keep up your farm and meet your rent–a thing you can never do unless you haul your husband about by the hair every day and beat him to his work.

“I pulled him out of bed just now and went out to the barn to see how things were getting along, when I came in again, he was sitting on a chair, asleep, with his breeches–saving your presence–pulled on one leg; so the switch had to come down from the hook, and my good Jeppe got a basting till he was wide awake again.”

Some might be tempted to read this monologue as a Brechtian exposé of organized religion (no doubt my intrepid director read it that way). But Nille is hardly the sort of reasonable and likeable character that normally functions as the author’s mouthpiece. When the Baron, as a final, cruel twist, subjects Jeppe to a mock execution towards the end of the play, Nille’s attitude to her husband turns 180 degrees, from hatred to cloying, tear-drenched sentimentality. But at the moment it becomes clear that Jeppe is not dead, but simply sleeping, Nille reverts to her old abusive ways; when her emotional attachment begins to imply duties and responsibilities, Nille balks.

Holberg’s masterpiece ends where it began, returning Jeppe to the state of drunken destitution in which we first found him. The Baron has revealed the hoax to the peasant, given him four silver thalers, and driven off in his carriage, leaving him to continue his pointless existence. The ever-feckless Jeppe has got nothing out of the experience: no epiphanic carpe diem induced by the mock execution, no new love for Nille, no new appreciation of the perks and perils of power. Even the Baron’s four thalers are gone – spent, of course, on beer and spirits.

Nille and Jeppe often seem to embody the worst traits of what is now sometimes called ‘the underclass’: sentimentality, laziness, substance abuse, contempt for their betters, and an inability to understand the full weight and necessity of patriarchal and religious authority.

Jeppe of the Hill is hardly an uncritical paean to the aristocracy – the Baron comes off as cruel and unlikeable – but neither is it the class-warfare tract some moderns read it as. In Norway, the playis often associated with the saying ‘Skomaker, bli ved din lest’ (‘Shoemaker, stay by your last’), and to the extent that it can be said to have a moral, this is it. The catastrophic consequences of Jeppe becoming Baron for a day is a microcosm of the chaos that ensues whenever wealth and power are divorced from cultivation and responsibility. In an age where the stupidity and vulgarity of the European nouveau riche have nearly completely eroded the aristocratic traditions of old, such insights seem prescient. More than an irreverent farce or a product of the Age of Reason, then, Jeppe… is a defence, transcending any particular age or ideology, of tradition, continuity, and natural hierarchy.