Sunday West 44

Canon Club #2: Richard Wagner

Good morning. Firstly, tickets are now available for the second ever Canon Club evening, which takes place next month in Clerkenwell. The subject is Richard Wagner, with the excellent historian Paul Lay speaking.

Since the last Sunday West, I wrote about Alfred the Great, hero of our nation (the book is available on Amazon),

I wrote about Ireland’s rebellion problem.

In the comments, Ruiari made a good point:

1-Irish Civil war, and the Troubles made the Irish government terrified of sounding strident- See Jack Lynch's not standing by speech.

2-Emigration takes the restless away. You may not live in Australia but you work there for two years

3- It takes a coalition of the two civil war parties to contain SF. This means that the the 2 government parties have to form a broad coalition.

Emigration is useful safety valve, both for genuinely tyrannical regimes and to a lesser extent for conservatives agrarian societies with poor economic prospects. In the past, many of the more discontent Irish people just left.

On crime, or its absence, in Japan and how it means they are able to enjoy so many basic nice things.

And on Tokyo syndrome – soyfacing in Japan.

Finally, on marriage rules from the medieval Catholic Church to the Tory party.

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In defence of ‘weebs’

On the subject of Japan, Christopher Harding wrote a very nice piece on ‘weebs’, of which I must now include myself.

Today, Japan seems more firmly entrenched than ever as a cultural superpower: up there with Italy, France and the United States. And yet something of that old suspicion remains. Express too strong an interest in Japanese culture — and in anime and manga especially — and you risk the accusation of being a “weeb”. The origins of the term lie with the 4chan online imageboard in the early 2000s, where Japan-obsessed white Westerners were derided as “wapanese” — a portmanteau of “wannabe Japanese” or “white Japanese”. Things got heated, and 4chan moderators replaced “wapanese” with the word “weeaboo”, from which “weeb” derives.

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Barriers of language and culture enhanced Japan’s exotic appeal. Visiting in the 1870s, the travel writer Isabella Bird commended Japan to her readers as offering “as much novelty perhaps as an excursion to another planet”. The British designer Christopher Dresser was meanwhile perplexed to find the otherwise “genial” and “loving” Japanese indulging the “barbaric cruelty” of slicing a live fish into quivering, edible chunks — a form of cuisine known as ikizukuri. And Irish-Greek writer Lafcadio Hearn, one of the first people to be called a “Japanophile”, described his adopted home of Japan as “a world of lesser and seemingly kindlier beings… the realisation, for imaginations nourished with English folklore, of the old dream of a World of Elves”.

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They don’t make ‘em like that anymore

Martin Spychal on the most violent MP ever elected.

John Patrick Somers (1800-1862) was an independent Liberal MP for the venal Irish borough of Sligo between 1837 and 1852, and then briefly again in 1857. ‘Pat Somers’, as he was better known, was regularly involved in duels and fights, made frequent threats of physical violence towards MPs, officials and journalists, and was an unashamed sponsor of electoral corruption. These attributes, as well as constant questions surrounding his personal finances, prompted one commentator to suggest that he was ‘the very last person who ought’ to sit in the Commons.

Despite being unseated in 1848, Somers returned to Parliament within a year, following two further by-elections. As well as advocating some genuinely populist politics, his pecuniary and emotional grip on the constituency of Sligo was strong. One historian has suggested that there was ‘not a family in [the] town’ untouched by his patronage. He was also highly intimidating. At one election he was accused of ‘perambulating the town, followed by a rabble-root of strumpets, and juvenile pickpockets, who set up discordant yells at the doors of his opponents’.

What a glorious age, although he would have been far better off in the previous one.

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The rich are revolting

At the Free Press, Suzy Weiss on multi-millionaire communist Fergie Chambers:

It feels like we’re throwing the same half-assed solutions at this over and over again and hoping it will yield something different,” he groans into his iPhone, which is on speaker. Fergie’s slight, but buff, on account of his multiple times a day martial arts training and competitions. His hair is cut short. A silver boxing glove dangles from one of his ears. He is covered in tattoos, including a double portrait of Stalin and Mao inked onto his thigh. He looks as if the phrase “Fuck you, Mom and Dad” were a person.

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Fergie’s the General Secretary of the Berkshire Communists, which describes itself as a “revolutionary Marxist-Leninist collective, aiming to promote the formation of a powerful workers’ party.” But the urgent issue that late summer afternoon—before Hamas’s war against Israel; before Fergie called for “making people who support Israel actually afraid to go out in public”; before three of Fergie’s comrades were arrested on the roof of a weapons manufacturer in New Hampshire—was that 16 comrades were descending on Alford for a weekend retreat, and it’s been pouring rain. The canvas tents they pitched on the property are letting in water. A skylight in one of the six houses there is leaking. The punching bags in the barn-turned-gym are in the wrong place. 

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Weird Austin

Daniel Kalder on migration from California to Texas.

Although Austin was a second-tier provincial city until very recently, it always punched above its weight when it came to the counterculture. Cheap rents, low house prices and Left-wing politics made it attractive to creative people and misfits: “slackers” unafflicted by the ambition and status anxiety that bedevils all those chasing careers in NYC or LA. Psychedelic music was born here, in the shape of The 13th Floor Elevator’s debut LP — released a year before Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. And in my almost two decades here, I have met many interesting characters without trying, including a Scottish BMX champion who was once name-dropped on an episode of Neighbours, Morrissey’s guitar technician, and a man who turned his PhD on crustaceans in Victorian literature into a career in AI. The poster boy for the Keep Austin Weird era was Leslie Cochran, a homeless man in a thong bikini who ran for mayor three times and had his own line of fridge magnets that allowed you to dress him in an array of outfits. Leslie’s death in 2012 (he was only 60) coincides almost too precisely with the last gasp of weird Austin.

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Superheroes and gods

James Marriott on superheroes as religion.

But more than entertainment and commercial gratification, fans seek identity, meaning and community. To a lot of people, “Which Hogwarts house are you?” or “Are you Marvel or DC?” are questions of existential urgency. Fans assemble online or in person at conventions. 

Anybody who doubts the sincerity of these attachments should tweet that Harry Potter is rubbish and see what happens. Giorgia Meloni talks about the role of The Lord of the Rings in shaping her moral and political outlook in the way previous generations of Italian politicians once talked about the Roman Catholic Church.

Indeed, it is no coincidence that the rise of franchise entertainment coincides with the decline of religion. The Harry Potter generation was the first that was really post-religious, for whom Bible stories no longer provided a common stock of characters and tales. But the disappearance of the Bible from the popular imagination does not imply the disappearance of the human need for shared stories that provide identity, community and values.

I’m with Scorsese on the whole superhero thing, but I agree that franchise characters provide some common cultural framework once served by the Bible. With regards to Harry Potter, I really think Britain should make more of it; I’ve argued before that we should make Heathrow a sort of Hogwarts-theme airport, but we should also build a giant theme park/hotel in the Watford area to serve international tourists, perhaps with a special train line from King’s Cross. Imagine their happiness as they approached to see this.

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The true origins of woke

N.S. Lyons debates whether wokeness is individualistic or collectivist.

The core feature of Wokeism is really the narcissism of “the self without limit,” made possible by complete faith in Progress, the malleability of both Nature and Man, and ultimately man’s ability to fully control, organize, and manage reality as if he were a god (thus producing equity and social justice, i.e. heaven on earth). In other words it encapsulates all the most defining characteristics of our modern age. I believe this should raise some uncomfortable questions for what might be called the “liberal theory of Woke.” For what is the true origin of Woke? Was it some outside anti-liberal force? Or was it really Enlightenment liberalism itself that gave birth to its own successor ideology? I am inclined to see it as the latter. The progressive liberation of the individual self from limits is after all that which puts the lib in liberalism.

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The Return of Cameron

David Cameron is back, in a quite bizarre end-of-season twist, to serve as Foreign Secretary, although who knows for how long. At the New Statesman, Will Lloyd wrote about the return of the Cameroons.

Like the Edwardians, the Cameroonian establishment were not bad people. Calling them a liberal metropolitan elite was always a slur – many of them also had homes in the country. But they were complacent, and that made them careless. Reading about the Sexy Fish party today, after Cameron’s dramatic return to front-line politics, is weirdly, almost unbearably poignant. If everything had gone to plan, Osborne would be in his second term as prime minister, and Cameron wouldn’t have needed Rishi Sunak to make him a lord.  

The Cameroons’ dreams were born of a comfortable sleep. Could the British be well-fed on a diet of populist referendums, cruel reality-TV formats, paeans to “hard-working families” and complementary attacks on “benefits scroungers”, as long as they were fronted by rational managers in dark blue suits, or slit-skirted glamazons who could hold a high note? It’s hard to shake the feeling that this is exactly what the Sexy Fish set thought.  

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Which dystopia?

Are we living in Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World? Neither, says Fred Skulthorp, we’re living in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

We never really seem to do much about it. Accepting the death of the dystopia may jolt us back into reality, forcing us to accept a more realistic, but no less grim trajectory for our present world. Brazil, Terry Gilliam’s 1985 synthesis of Brave New World and 1984, created a world of camp authoritarianism and kitsch decadence. This is not a tyranny of an overarching ideology and a corresponding moralism, but a tyranny of self interest, human incompetence and broken systems.

Our protagonist, a hapless civil servant stuck in a spiral of meaningless career arc, falls in love with a terrorist in a fugue of boredom and bureaucratic incompetence. Unlike an Orwell or Huxley character, he does not dream of joining her in a quest to overthrow the system or articulating the real meaning of freedom. He dreams only of sleeping with her and escaping his job. In the final scene, the two have somehow managed to pull off an escape from the secret police — but this is just another one of his erotic daydreams. He is left lobotomised in a seemingly blissful state. Such a vision is far bleaker for parodying the very fantasy of rebellion. Its cynicism is the perfect antidote to our age of idealistic but hollow escapism through our own fictional nightmares.

There’s a cheery thought. Have a happy Sunday everyone!

Finally, in more me news, while I was in Poland recently I spoke to Ben Sixsmith for Visegrad24’s YouTube channel, which is now available.