NAMES

R.U. Badde -- Police Interrogator
B.B. Goode -- Televangelist
Z.Z. Fitts -- Narcoleptic
I.M. Sadde -- Depressive

Whenever I listen to righties they seem to circle back to some of the same canonical texts. Last night Bill O'Reilly quoted Edmund Burke, "All it takes for evil to prosper, is that good men do nothing." He was talking about the riot at Columbia University in which a group of anarchists chased several members of the Minutemen off the stage, and apparently threatened them with a massacre unless they decamped. The campus police did nothing at all. Now the president of Columbia has sent a warning to three of the anarchist students. O'Reilly commented that it was like the warning received in Animal House -- a double-secret warning -- which in effect meant nothing at all. The camera then showed the president trying to speak at a convocation of some kind, and a student grabbing the microphone from him, and speaking in his place. The president of Columbia looked baffled, but let it continue, while weakly trying to get the microphone back. O'Reilly's grin was priceless, as was his rolling of the eyes.

Edmund Burke still circulates. He stood up to the notion of the French Revolution. I read one of his earlier books on the sublime. He was only 26 when he wrote it. This later became a major inspiration for Kant's Critique of Judgment. I have a copy of Edmund Burke's book on the French Revolution and should read it. I believe that it is a critique of enthusiasm itself as a measure of the rightness of ideas. Enthusiasm was coming to be regarded with favor. In Hume's later books the notion that feeling is the basis of morality has come to be accepted in the left. That feeling itself is where we should base our principles. This is backwards, and impossible, and chaotic. I prefer the Ten Commandments. I also think it's important to remember that everyone feels differently about different ideas. Feeling is individual. It's not universal. James Madison's ideas of checks and balances is meant as a stay against any one individual claiming their own feelings as a universal.

If we do not get universals from feeling or from God where else might they come from? Some have tried reason, but reason can't reason outside of itself to FOUND axioms. Axioms in a sense DETERMINE thinking. Those who start with God, for instance, as an axiom, end up at a different place from those who start with feeling. This is why I like the Two Kingdoms thinking of the Augustinians. The notion that God gives us principles, but that we can never embody them, and if we think we do, we are immediately to think of ourselves as evil incarnate. No one can embody the principles. What then is our relationship to them? We cannot embody truth and justice because we are fallen. Augustine said that we can in a sense lean toward them through the proper kind of yearning, and through prayer, and with grace, we can at least distantly approximate what Jesus knew.

Another book that seems to get a lot of attention in the right but which I haven't read: Ideas Have Consequences, by ? Is it Whittaker Chambers, or is Whittaker Chambers someone else I haven't read?

The ideas of the left: Marx especially, are putrid. I've seen where they lead. As I leave the left as a graveyard of depravity, I look to the right. There doesn't seem to be any center, any balance. So the idea is to read the best of the left, and the best of the right, and create a balance. No bird can fly on one wing. Our culture needs a left wing and a right wing. It also needs a center to bring the two together and give it some heart. That center is Lutheran Surrealism.

SELF-SERVING ARGUMENT CONTINUES

Perhaps all arguments are self-serving. My argument against totalitarian Marxist English departments is just that. But it's also something more. It's an argument for diversity that hoists the diversity argument on its own petard while simultaneously maintaining an air of objectivity. But it's even more than that. It's a plea for sanity.

My concern is that Marxism has never been particularly good to writers: much more concern has been spent with killing or silencing them in communist countries than in nurturing them. In Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge they went all the way of course: slaughtering every literate person, but some version of that complete obliteration of individual visions has always been the norm in communist countries. You are not permitted to have a personal vision. You must illustrate the party line. This has made for fairly boring literature. That this less than 1% who call themselves Marxists has taken over American English departments is quite unpromising for the future of literature. Most of our great writers have had at least one foot in Christianity -- Shakespeare clearly a Catholic with a great deal of affection for Lutheran Hamlet; Emily Dickinson; Marianne Moore going twice a week. The great writers of the 17th century: Herbert, etc. They can't be understood outside of the Christian context that nourished them. But very few if any scholars are being prepared to study them, or to keep them alive from within their original context. The gauntlet won't allow it. In terms of Marianne Moore -- there are some 20 or 30 books now on her 100 poems that she kept -- and out of all that and the thousand or so articles there are two or three articles that look at her work from within the Presbyterian context in which she spent her whole life. Her work is often strait-jacketed and tortured into speaking for the far left when she herself was a Republican who wore a Nixon button and was for the war in Vietnam.That 80% of the taxpayers and the writers they have nourished should be silenced by a very vocal 1% or less seems unjust, but I suppose to those who believe that they are justice personified nothing that they can ever do will ever seem unjust.Again, I am only responding to the problem within English departments.

Perhaps again the Marxists think that they do nurture writers, I wouldn't know. If so, where are the poets produced by the Khmer Rouge. Where are the poets who were raised under Mao? Stalin? And Mrs. Ceausescu thought of herself as a profound member of the literati but who now except clinical psychologists will read her work? The handful of writers from communist countries who are famous seem to be almost entirely against communism: Solzhenitsyn, Kundera, are two of the few who managed to survive Marxism and still publish books.

The deadly gauntlet of Marxist literature establishments crushed a century of literature in the countries in which it was adopted. Why then are so many of the English departments in this country turning Marxist? Do they secretly wish to crush literature out of some kind of jealousy? How else can this phenomenon be explained?

Ann Althouse's blog (althouse.blogspot.com) alerted me to an editorial that appeared this weekend in the New York Times (Saturday edition) written by Stanley Fish. I have written about Stanley Fish before and if I knew how to make one of those hyperlink deals I would do it but I don't know how, and at any rate, this post will be long enough for most to deal with as it is. In the article this weekend in the Times, Fish argued that the role of a teacher should be to help students analyze a position, not force them to assume a position. At issue was a college in Missouri (?) in which a student had been forced to write a left-wing letter to a congressman. The student was a conservative Christian and refused, and was penalized in terms of her grade and was threatened with expulsion from her department. She sued the teacher and the school paid a monetary penalty and punished the teacher as well.

But Fish argued that in spite of this increasingly common problem that the monopoly by the left of academia shouldn't matter as long as teachers are analyzing as opposed to proselytizing. To some extent I agree with this. Fish himself is brilliant at analyzing. I heard him talk last summer on similar issues and I could have happily listened to him for 14 hours straight. He has a mind capable of quick and sinuous turns and fabulous maneuvers, and is capable of making deep assessments of interesting issues instantaneously. He reminded me of Gorgias of ancient Athens. Gorgias did not have a transcendent framework as Socrates and Plato did, but he argued instead for a relativist position in which persuasion was the rule. When men or women of great intellect take this viewpoint I don't have any problem with it. I also don't have any problem with communist teachers in general so long as they are geniuses. I studied with communist geniuses in graduate school, and they also didn't have any problem with me. I'm still close friends with many communist geniuses I met in graduate school.

The problem is when geniuses hire stupid people simply because they agree. I think that in academia departments ought to hire the smartest person in the pool of applicants. They should never hire someone simply on the basis of political agreements. That is a disaster. First of all, people can change their minds. Then you're stuck with a stupid person who you find disagreeable. A smart person with whom you disagree is still a smart person and that in itself is a virtue in academia because they will attract good students, and the students will leave satisfied and attract other smart people. But stupid people are dangerous because they will hire other stupid people independently of whether or not they agree and they will attract stupid students, and that's what you don't want. A department full of stupid people is a department that has lost its reason for existence. I believe that this is something that is more likely to happen to communists than to other groups. Communists too often want a one-party system. One-party systems are dangerous because of their monopoly on ideas. After a while, you have only people who enforce the prevalent opinions -- and you're in something of the tenuous situation of Maoist China when the Red Guards ruled in Peking. At that point you have no ideas at all, just a raging lynch mob looking for dissent to crush.

It ought not to matter what positions someone holds as long as they have a brain. But given that we have so many Marxists already in humanities positions, it would make sense to me that David Horowitz' campaign for intellectual diversity (discussed and dismissed in Fish's article) be given some credence. In a tight choice between two candidates, I think the smart department would hire someone who ISN'T A MARXIST, just to get some intellectual diversity into the staff. You need this to keep everyone's pencil sharpened and to prevent the monotony and tyranny of one-party domination. Departments that insist on one-party domination will force themselves out of existence, as communist societies did. They will get more and more dull, and eventually they will have all the genius of communist literature under Stalin or Mao.

This doesn't mean that departments should hire stupid people just because they aren't Marxists. I would rather work with a brilliant Marxist than a mediocre Christian or a dumb Ayn Randian. Diversity should never come at the expense of quality.

At the same time intellectual uniformity should be discouraged as much as possible. Just as departments have discouraged hiring from within in order to promote freshness of ideas, so they should look outwards to different faiths and attitudes to prevent stultification.

ORGASM AS FALSE IDOL

The French surrealist left under Breton embraced the Marquis de Sade as a symbol of revolt. Sade was a sociopath at the very least, a criminal sociopath. The left embrace of criminals as they stood against a corrupt order (odor) of an aristocracy that cared nothing about its poor (let them eat cake) was a great mistake. It is a mistake however that radiated throughout French literature, and today Sade is considered by many to be France's greatest writer. I would prefer to think of him in terms called forth by Hannah Arendt, "the banality of evil."

Tel Quel was an important group of French intellectuals centered on Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers, but also including Roland Barthes, and many others. Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault were closely associated with the group. Their embrace of Sade as a group is part of the revulsion I feel in general for their work and their lives. Even Simone de Beauvoir who is often held up as a moral unit by which to measure others wrote a book in praise of Sade. Her horrible tome, "Faut-il Bruler Sade?" [Must We Burn Sade?] ends with the almost psychotic notion that "Sade is a great moralist." SdB herself committed statutory rape against one of her students -- a seventeen year old philosophy student -- Jewish -- when she and Sartre were done with her they threw her into the streets of occupied Paris. The story of this as told by her victim can be found in the book A Disgraceful Affair.

Freud is another problem. He championed the orgasm. The orgasm however is nothing without love. Love is the greater of the two. Freud-Sade postulated that the VICIOUS orgasm was the most desirable -- the orgasm had at the expense of the other or even at the cost of the extermination of the other. This is now consecrated as an avant-garde value and it is seen in the FF culture, the SM culture, which is spreading into mainstream culture. What about love? What do I mean by love? Trust, affection, the promise of decency that will endure to the end of time. Caring about the other. SdB herself seemed to organize the meaning of her life around her first orgasm with Nelson Algren in Chicago in 1947.

The criteria by which we organize life's meaning must be changed. Many have said that Christ is a right-wing figure. I disagree. Any left worthy of the name must embrace the ideals of Christianity: love, decency, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. The ten commandments. Sade, like Saddam, must be toppled as the central criterion of value, and replaced with God.

REMEMBERING ED DORN: A POET OF THE NOSE

In thinking back over my "canon" of what I consider to be important writers it is almost entirely solitaries. These are writers who stand outside of received opinion and sniff at it with disdain. Soupault's departure from the surrealist movement, Klossowski's departure from The College of Sociology, and Ed Dorn's dismissal of the communitarian poetics of the sixties makes them all in my view worthy of respect. This inability to merge leaves them with another ability: that of divergence. I first knew of Ed Dorn when he was my teacher at Naropa. He was fifty but would come in to class and talk of this and that, after removing his motorcyle helmet. He wore a white t-shirt, no words on it, bluejeans. Taut. He looked like Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter. Lean, hard, intense. He stood against the communists in Berkeley with Tom Clark. They hated the Language poets. They also hated the hijinks at Naropa institute where Trungpa and his goons had stripped the poet W.S. Merwin -- attempting to sheer him like a sheep. Dorn was anything but sheepish and would never stand for such a thing: wouldn't go looking to a guru for knowledge.

I love Ed Dorn and Tom Clark because they keep an open investigation in place: and are often iconoclastic toward the blinkers of the left (where peace will come if pacifism is practiced, for instance, which is almost always untrue). Dorn's infamous poem in praise of bullets as more important than bulletins is meant largely as a provocation rather than as a treatise of consolidated opinion. He would argue for instance that we should "bomb Red China" over dinner. He did once do this in my presence in Seattle while he was making riced potatoes with a ricer he had spent the afternoon trying to procure. I knew that he didn't want to bomb Red China. He was provocative. Dorn opened doors and left them open. Perhaps this seems like he was actually unhinged.

I saw him rather as exploratory and fascinated with possibilities: he didn't mean to settle discourses he meant to unsettle discourses. He didn't close, he opened.

Whenever he saw a closed door of opinion he felt somehow compelled to see why the door had been closed and to open it. He didn't like closure or enclosure, he preferred the wide open spaces of the west.

Consistency can also equal consistently blind, as in consistently wearing blinders. Dorn offers sparkling new viewpoints rather than a closed and dogmatic consistency. He's jagged and iconoclastic but always fresh and daring. I find his work bracing in its incoherence.

If you read any of his essays in Abhorrences I think you'll see he's just opening doors. You never get a conclusion. He's almost Deleuzian in that sense. If Dorn survives it won't be as a settled being, but rather as a coyote that refuses to settle. He's not a communitarian and this may be part of the irritation that he causes -- he has his nose out like a coyote -- his dinner would never be the gravy train -- he was a survivor in wild open spaces. I was once told that he had grown up poor without a father and that his mother had at times sold her virtue to make "ends meet." One has this sense that in such an unsettled existence one would have to come to rely on one's own wits.

Corso's upbringing had given him a similar sense: don't trust others. Trust your own nose. Codrescu's upbringing in communist Romania had given him this sense, too. The hierarchy is corrupt: follow your nose. Soupault among the surrealists: something stinks about their allegiance to communism, steer clear. Many have been gobbled up by Marxism and Maoism, and are turned into a horde that sees in some OTHER a menace, turning the other into a symbol of one's own hysterics, but this persecution of the other -- 60 million dead in the Great Leap Forward, millions more dead in the Cultural Revolution, whipped up by rhetoric that can only be seen through by those who use their nose rather than theory as guide.

In the Soviet Union Dorn would've been in the Gulag, and I'd have been proud if he'd have been my bunkmate. A wary and provocative animal -- whereas many poets were coming to settle -- as Charles Olson had SETTLED in Gloucester, Dorn was a high plains drifter making a last stand in Boulder at the University of Colorado, where he seems to have unsettled almost everyone. He was not an institutional being. I love the solitary desert feeling in Dorn's work.

I personally find it very different: no grand theories -- each poem completely specific to a place and time, and responding only to that -- and drawing us in to a specific texture, and to heck with abstraction, a poetry of the nose, rather than ideology.

I finished reading The World According to Garp this week with the Great Writers Class. It's a Literature 310. Toward the end of the novel Garp is shot twice and killed by a member of a feminist group called the Ellen Jamesians. I explained to the students that no such group had ever existed and that feminist assassinations (aside from that of Valerie Solanas' shot into the body of Andy Warhol) are as rare as attempts on the president by Eskimos.

But nevertheless John Irving's book seems to have gotten into an aspect of the early 80s zeitgeist that millions tuned into. The Ellen Jamesians were perceived as real. Just as Jenny Fields was perceived as real. More real than real. Surreal, perhaps. Eerily accurate. The feminist movement turned hateful, and even murderous in its intensity. Irving's book still sells bucketloads. My brother runs a bookstore and he says it's still one of his top sellers. The book is brilliant in many ways: there are so many structurally ingenious qualities that in almost every chapter there are parallels, and ironies, that would take years to accurately fathom.

As we finished I for one was nevertheless dissatisfied with the way the theme turns out. Garp is considered an angry rapist male by the Ellen Jamesians when he is in fact relatively sweet toward his wife, and certainly against rape (earlier in the novel he chases down a rapist and this leads to the rapist's arrest). But Garp is bothered by the Ellen Jamesians. These are feminists who voluntarily cut off their tongues to symbolize what is done to women. And to some extent what is done is real. Even today all over the world there are women being held captive against their will. Even in relatively decent places like Amsterdam and Paris and New York City there are female sex slaves held against their will with their children used as collateral. The Japanese held hundreds of thousands of Korean women as sex slaves during WWII and refuse to admit even today that they did it. And yet it bothers Garp that women would voluntarily cut off their own tongues even if it is to make a point that this is what happens to many women.

He writes a letter to a leading magazine to mock them, and the Ellen Jamesians turn on him. There is an attempt at vehicular homicide by a woman in a dirty white Saab. Then, a woman dressed as a nurse pops him in the wrestling room with two bullets and he dies.

What is strange is that the narrator implies that Garp should have been "more tolerant of the intolerant," and that this wouldn't then have happened. If you look the other way then presumably extremists will go away, in other words. This is the kind of ostrich's head in the sand idea that in turn drives me crazy about some liberals. Garp toward the end of the novel and after the first assassination attempt starts to love everyone. Then he foolishly thinks that in turn everyone will love him back. Hardly true. Again, this is a liberal problem. There are always factions and there is always going to be competition for resources.

In the novel there is a kind of victimocracy that gets money through either publishing efforts or from the Fields Foundation -- a Foundation set up by Garp's mother for victims. There is no merit in their applications. Women simply say, I have been hurt, and they have checks cut for them. Somehow this is the "answer" in the novel. Meanwhile, there is a meritocracy in the novel as well. Garp's books (he is a novelist within the novel) are considered "important." And Helen writes articles that are highly esteemed by other specialists in literary scholarship.

And somehow between these two economies is the national economy of capitalism. You can make money in the novel either by being a victim or through having merit. Or even having merit as a victim.

The victim mentality is linked to Democratic politics in the novel. The merit mentality is linked to the exclusive Steering academy based in Republican New Hampshire. And somehow already the nascent culture war is dramatized through these two economies in the book as:

Victimocracy or Meritocracy.

But even then they aren't mutually exclusive. Ultimately Garp maxes out in terms of both economies: not only is he the great writer of all time (seemingly) but he is also the greatest victim and is even linked to Jesus Christ in the end of the book (both die at age 33, and in one sentence He is explicitly linked to Garp).

I'm not comfortable with the victimocracy. I'm also not completely comfortable with the meritocracy. I'm uncomfortable with the idea that we should be "tolerant toward the intolerant." I think the Ellen Jamesians, or any terrorist group, should be wiped off the map by whatever police or army resources exist. In this novel the one who pops Garp is rehabilitated and becomes a fine mother.

I think assassins should be given the electric chair.

Next we're reading A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, about a sympathetic midget.

Lutheran Surrealism. Noun. Protestant art movement first theorized by Kirby Olson in about 1997. The basic philosophy was to resuscitate the notion of the "marvelous" in Bretonian theory, but to ally it with Lutheran ethics. Surrealism did not have an ethics (they actually looked to the Marquis de Sade as a model of behavior). So, Lutheran Surrealism posited in the absence of ethics in orthodox surrealism a return to the Ten Commandments, to prayer, and to church membership. However, since Lutheranism was lacking an aesthetics, the convulsive aesthetics of surrealism was essayed. In practice, there is often a good deal of objectivism in the manner of Charles Reznikoff in Lutheran Surrealist poetry. Other key background influences: Marianne Moore, P.G. Wodehouse, Philippe Soupault, Beat writers, Romanian dada, St. Paul, and Jesus Christ, as well as nursery rhymes and advertising jingles.

Exact membership of the group is unknown. Originally it was posited that only Lutherans in good standing with a strong interest in the convulsive aesthetics of surrealism could be members. In practice the group consisted of Marxists, Presbyterians, and even perhaps some true conservative Roman Catholics, and was not limited to Lutherans nor even to human beings. It was posited that whales could be Lutheran Surrealists, and also that spiders, especially under the influence of mind-altering drugs such as Pepsi, could spin a web to catch at sin along with the most ardent Lutheran surrealists.

Group was sometimes criticized as being surrealist Lutherans (Ron Silliman). Group norms still evolving and in a state of unclear definition, this short post being the most complete definition of Lutheran Surrealism to date. The originator of the movement argued strenuously against utopianism in the arts and government, believing that since everyone was fallen, it was best to adopt the checks and balances of James Madison in government, and in the arts to adopt a self-ironic stance. This was debated, at times hotly, by members of the group.

Yesterday it suddenly turned warm. We've been having temperatures of about nine degrees F when suddenly it turned sixty. The three feet of snow receded quickly and now one can see the edges of lawns, and roofs of houses have reappeared from under the snow. Last night I walked from my house down into town. Most of the housing stock in Delhi as you get into town has a gingerbread or Queen Anne feeling to it. Some of the houses havea lot of peeling paint, but others are immaculately kept. But now under the snow have emerged various small messes: a bucket left out before the snow started, or a broom that has reappeared. My eyes itched faintly from allergies. I walked along High Street. My pastor's lights were blazing from three floors. Down past the post office I went. I couldn't hear anything except the pounding waters in the drainage system throughout the town. Tonight we are expected to get rain and there's a flood warning. There are still Christmas trees that were left out for the Department of Transportation to pick up in early February at the end of driveways which have now lost their snow covering and now smell bad like dead bodies. Walking back up to my house up a steep hill someone suddenly let off a bottle rocket which corkscrewed into my eardrum and I jumped. People are beginning to emerge from winter hibernation.

I was over at althouse.blogspot.com reading some of the older posts and one was a brief bit about "walkable cities." This is one of the things that first drew me to surrealism in my twenties. I love to walk, and so did the surrealists. My favorite surrealist Philippe Soupault could do thirty miles around Paris in a day. His novel Last Nights of Paris is an all-time hit at my house: it's about walking around Paris at night. It was translated by William Carlos Williams into English in 1927 and remains in print. The translation is poor but the quality of the original is so high that even with the sloppy translation undertaken over a skiing weekend when Williams and his mom were stuck in a ski cabin with the flu it's still one of the best reads of the surrealist movement.

Lutherans are perhaps not so keen on walking as they should be although St. Paul seems to have been an inveterate walker, and Jesus himself could scuff up the old foot leather when he wasn't actually walking on water.

Althouse mentioned that in this month's Prevention magazine (April 2007) there is an article on p. 118 about the top ten walkable cities.

But, if you go to http://www.prevention.com/cities

You find a list of their top 100 cities. Or is it the 100 cities they looked at in order? Newark, NJ is listed as 100th. Austin, TX where Brett lives is listed #2. Henderson, Nevada where WW lived for some time is listed 7th. San Diego is in the top ten, and that's where Carl Sachs lived. Seattle is in the top ten. Portland is also there. One of the great sorrows of life in the bitter cold of the Catskills is that for at least four months of the year walking is painful. And then the sidewalks here are indundated in the spring as they are right now. It's raining and the snow is melting, and there is two inches of water everywhere. When summer does come my neighborhood doesn't even have sidewalks. There was a town meeting last spring and the neighbors simply said we don't want sidewalks. And so that put that in the kabosh, if that's what it's called.

With Aristotle, we believe that philosophy should be based on the peripatetic. With Nietzsche, we believe that any thought that comes when one isn't walking is almost certainly unsound, and maybe can't even be considered a thought.

Paris is certainly the best city in which I've ever walked. Helsinki is not bad at all. In Helsinki you get great views of the frozen seas out toward Estonia and there are amazing Eastern Orthodox cathedrals and excellent shopping and everyone is blond and gorgeous and they have an indigenous style of architecture known as National Romantic. It's a knockout. Seattle is good from center city out clear to Green Lake even in the winter during the drizzle which scarcely soaks one through. Portland, Oregon is excellent because of all the funny little parks. In summer it's hot but it's a dry heat so it's comfortable and there is plenty to see.

Delhi, NY (a mere slip of a village pop. 3000) is not terrible when you are an adult walking alone, but if you have three children under 7 in tow it gets hairy. You can see churches and strange old trees, and of course the ubiquitous American ant cultivating its mound. There are thousands of varieties of birds: I've seen indigo bunting, and even a Barrett owl. There are no sidewalks to speak of in my neighborhood and people come pounding through with the music blasting at 40 mph so I always feel panicked, and have to hold the hands of all three kids the entire time and I can't daydream for even a moment or else we might all be flattened. The woods around Delhi have some ok trails but the rumors of mountain lions in them make me hesitant to venture into them with my tots in tow. Mountain lions would especially like 3-year-old J., because his knees have marshmallows in them to add to the taste, or so I imagine from the viewpoint of the Mountain Lion.

"The Hmong is not a kind of bean."

I woke up this morning and wrote down this phrase. I looked up in Wikipedia, however, and it turns out that Hmong not only refers to a group of people living in Vietnam and Laos, but that there is such a thing as a Hmong bean.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mucuna_gigantea.jpg

CHRISTIANITY TAKES LONG TERM VIEW: MARXISM SHORT

Marxism presents antagonism between the classes as the driving force in world history. Marxist feminism takes antagonism between the sexes as the driving force in world history.

I've always thought that antagonism is basically a dumb philosophy.

Anyone who is antagonist toward their spouse is an idiot. The idea of friendship has to be there between spouses. It ought to be there as well between employer and employee. It's crazy for there not to be this love. Friendship is the basis of human society, not antagonism.

Marxism presents antagonism as the basis.

Christianity presents the opposite. In Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol Scrooge realizes that money is not the driving force of life. It is love and friendship. When he delivers food to his employee's house and is invited in for Christmas dinner (I forget the details and see Mr. Magoo as I'm writing this) that is the telos of society. Society is based on friendship.

Underneath any lasting marital arrangement must be friendship. People are idiotic to get married for any other reason.

The church as I've always seen it has been based on love. Martin Luther and his wife Kathe were friends. Of course they argued, but there was a love between them that was unbreakable. It's one of the great love stories of all time.

Instead of antagonism as the basis of the race, gender and class attacks of the Marxists, we ought to realize that if we really want a society worth living in that we have to think about friendship. That is the basis of comedy. In comedy people who start out as enemies end up as friends. It's the basis of almost every comedy. This is why I was interested in it.

The anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin in his book Mutual Aid understood this. Most Christians understand it.

That's what we have to study: how friendship is the basis of any society worth having.

This has been the basis of almost all my writing and teaching: the spirit of comedy from the viewpoint of mutual aid.

IN THE FUTURE ALL LOVE MUST BE LESBIAN LOVE!

Communism argued that there were two classes and they needed to be turned into one. The bourgeoisie would be eliminated by the proletariat, and we would have the end of history.

Communist feminism argued that there were two genders and they needed to be turned into one. The men would be eliminated by the women, and we would have the end of history.

While communists did indeed act and in many cases succeeded in wiping out their bourgeoisie: USSR, Red China, N. Korea and Cambodia almost entirely succeeded in destroying private property and those whose happiness consisted of the pursuit of individual purchasing power. The only happiness left in those societies was totally owned by the few who had managed to get hold of the bursaries of the state and the ability to purchase western goods.

Feminists however have rarely heeded the call to murder the other gender. Valery Solanas is one of the few to act on the injunction to wipe out all men. She shot Warhol, but even then it took him ten years to die. Did she ever think of taking a marx-manship course first?

Perhaps even Marxist feminists don't take the implications of their ideological history seriously. They should be trying to wipe out men, those imperialistic capitalists of sperm, so that in the future all love will be lesbian love!

Communism was at least serious. Is feminism really serious about its injunctions? Even though I've read Daphne Patai's book Heterophobia, and Valery Solanas' book S.C.U.M. manifesto, and McKinnon's Feminist Theory of the State, it doesn't seem that anyone ever acts on the ideas that are seemingly everywhere within feminism. If feminism is really Marxist then by gum they should act like Marxists and kill everybody. But they never do. Can anyone explain this?

Why has no society of communist women upped and destroyed the men outside of a few mythical tales such as that in the background of Jason and the Argonauts on the island of Lemnos?

The proletariat did enact their founder's prescription.

Maybe women are too busy having babies or something, but I feel they should get busy and save feminist theory. Communist feminism has a whole gender to kill. Just making men more like girls by softening them up with therapy (Tony Soprano) isn't good enough for me. I want gender-o-cide, followed by a world of perfectly promiscuous lesbian love. I mean, what are theories for unless they lead directly to praxis?

In the preface to the fourth edition of The Origins of the Family we find Friedrich Engels writing about Johann Bachofen. He calls Bachofen a "mystic of genius" and says that we owe much to him, in fact, everything to him, in terms of his study of the Family. This text in turn has been picked up by feminists and has been the central text of the arguments surrounding patriarchy, a term that no one can understand without having read Bachofen's book. Here's Engels:

"It is therefore a tough and by no means always a grateful task to plow through Bachofen’s solid tome. But all that does not lessen his importance as a pioneer. He was the first to replace the vague phrases about some unknown primitive state of sexual promiscuity by proofs of the following facts: that abundant traces survive in old classical literature of a state prior to monogamy among the Greeks and Asiatics when not only did a man have sexual intercourse with several women, but a woman with several men, without offending against morality; that this custom did not disappear without leaving its traces in the limited surrender which was the price women had to pay for the right to monogamy; that therefore descent could originally be reckoned only in the female line, from mother to mother; that far into the period of monogamy, with its certain or at least acknowledged paternity, the female line was still alone recognized; and that the original position of the mothers, as the only certain parents of their children, secured for them, and thus for their whole sex, a higher social position than women have ever enjoyed since. Bachofen did not put these statements as clearly as this, for he was hindered by his mysticism. But he proved them; and in 1861 that was a real revolution."

How much of the feminist assault on patriarchal marriage is owed to this text by Engels where he turns Bachofen on his head? I would argue: 110%. Although few are aware of who pointed the dog's tail at the Family as the center of female oppression and barked the orders for an attack, I will assert that it is Engels (most feminists agree!).

I had been arguing about this over at Anne Althouse's blog with various unnamed leftists, or leftists with Frenchified monikers that indicate a state of deep sleep.

Shows such as Sex in the City, Friends, and others came up. I haven't followed these shows closely. I haven't been able to complete a single episode of Sex in the City, for example. I look at their leopard print dresses and the way they talk, and can't stand it as it feels so fake-tough, and flick back to boxing, or over to a news channel. Friends is somewhat more palatable to me: I like Jennifer Aniston's on again and off again relationship with Ross, and there is a certain innocence to Chandler and Monika which I can enjoy; Phoebe is also good demented fun as is Joey.

They represent a generation that believed in the idea that the family is an untrustworthy vehicle of love. Chandler and Monika nevertheless end up as a family (then the show ends having attained its teleological goal). I'd like to see a show about them as mother and father, with Joey coming in and becoming progressively more of a loser, but instead we got a show about Joey, who is a loser.

Often in family shows the male head of the family is presented as a dickhead. Ray Romano's show makes me quite queasy, for instance. Why do he and his brother have to be presented as having a collective IQ of 60 in the show Everybody Loves Raymond?

This perpetual assault on fatherhood is what I see as the legacy of Engel's text even when not everybody has read the text. It provides a deep headwater for an effluvium of drivel having to do with the sewerage of what the left perceives to be the Family.

The left's unconscious idea of the Ideal Family is best seen by the Manson family. That's where Engels' communism leads.

The right's idea of the Family is perhaps best critiqued from the Left with Archie Bunker as the father, dealing with his hippy son-in-law and his dippy daughter and his borderline retarded wife.

The family is something to be mocked, interrogated, and finally, dissolved, or so it seems. It's the basis of everything I find revolutionary (revolting) about the left. They hate the "patriarchal" family where there are rules and order, and a sense of responsibility for children. They want to massacre the family -- especially the father, but also the children, and to leave only the mother intact (but she's not a mother now but a machine for orgasm and failed sexual acts ending in the most dreadful of things -- a pregnancy -- which might slow her rapid ascent to the realm of CEO).

And yet, the Family is the only vehicle that survives for most. Friends aren't there in the long run in spite of what that show's ditty at the beginning claims. Mothers and fathers for the most part, are all that anybody gets. There are few public figures who understand this and who have general respect. Bill Cosby understands it. I find what he says to be touching and true even if he himself played a relatively goofy dad in his show he did at least portray the vulnerability of fatherhood. Do we have any adequate descriptions of the family either in TV or in books coming out? As I watch the Sopranos (I'm only in episode 14 of the first season) I see the most touching aspect of these aging mafiosi is that they care about their children. Pussy wants his kids to get into college and do better than he did. Tony Soprano wants the same. Tony's daughter Meadow is a true concern for Mr. Soprano. A true concern. One rarely sees that anywhere in our culture but it is the absolute truth: family love trumps anything else and is the strongest love that exists -- even among animals.

Talk to the toughest postmodernist you know and if they have a kid, you find vulnerability.

Even for the toughest postmodernist who believes that life should be a sexual free-for-all all day and all night, when it comes to his own daughter, he wants out of that particular and goes back to the 1950s at least in his imagination.

Surrealism rarely discusses children. It's a definite drawback to surrealism. Postmodernism also rarely discusses children, or family. Only in the very late poems of Soupault (in his 80s) does he dare to discuss his concern for children.

Engels tries to wipe it out as a horror show and return to some primeval world where everybody was humping each other in the mud and children are raised by a village instead of a specific mother and father.

But unless the Marxists get serious about family and start to see it as the center of society (not money, and not class) I can't take them seriously. If enterprises can't be reliably run when no one really owns them (communism has revealed this to be the case) then if no one cares about a specific child there will be the same result. All children will be orphans if they don't have a specific mother and father.

Family is the absolute center of any decent society. Anyone who doesn't get that is not even an animal. They are a plant. A communist plant.

Here's a poem by a Catholic named Ruth Soter who hung out in feminist circles in the latter part of the 20th century and is now largely forgotten:

Haiku

Let me look at you,
Invulnerable woman
When you have a son.

(the only references I know to her are that Anne Sexton was her friend and has a poem dedicated to her, and she's mentioned by W.D. Snodgrass in Poet's Bookshelf, edited by Peter Davis -- it's from this volume that I quote her poem --)

The family dares us to love someone until death do us part. It's the greatest risk, and the greatest adventure that anyone can have. Postmodernists think that they are all about risks. Surrealists thought they were running great risks when they dared to visit prostitutes or go out and consort with the criminal element. No, the true risks are run by the orthodox who dare to stay home and believe in God, and love their parents & children.