THE PSYCHOSIS OF THE MATRIARCHAL PC PERSONALITY

I still don't understand it. But I think Howard Schwartz does:

http://www.sba.oakland.edu/faculty/schwartz/PCJABS.htm

"The Business of America is Business."

My problem with the compassion crowd is that they can't grok this sentence, which is more powerful than Stein's A Rose is a Rose is a Rose, because it says something about the long-range nature of the American economy. The compassion crowd wants everything for free, and that there should be no consequences for the lack of a work ethic. Students who do nothing should get A's! Compassion! Workers who produce nothing should be rich! Compassion! But the fact is that this would lead to an economic implosion, and a desert. I find it heartless that the "minds" at the top should perpetuate the fraudulent beliefs of the communist poet-tasters who insist that the youth should imbibe such goofy nonsense. It's heartless, I tell you! Heartless!

I'd rather that the youth element get the hard news of Calvinism straight from Calvin Coolidge.

The Comments Box over at Silliman's Blog

One of the problems with the Blog World is the comments box. In my case, I never police it, but often wish there were more commenters, and more zaniness, but also do like it when it heats up a bit. Usually it heats up when my posts are long and I'm actually thinking about something fairly intensively. Sometimes I've felt really truly burned -- as when Stephen Baraban has attacked me. At such points my whole body has burned sometimes for eight hours at a time. But heck, one can also be killed by kindness.

Ron Silliman's comment box on the other hand has been explosive at times. Huge and completely unnecessary arguments. Almost like life itself. Then he decided to monitor it. Since then, you had to remember to be PC, but I would sometimes forget, because Ron has a split personality and is partially a liberal. He doesn't like to censor, but I suspect he is surrounded by comrades who believe the censorship is necessary and even fun.

So part of the fun of Ron's comment box was testing the limits -- like seeing if you could say ... without getting bounced. Sort of like trying to catch the very corner of the plate and having the ump call it a strike. But now thanks to his ghoulish comrades he's apparently going to tighten it up. That's ok. I don't care. I like the idea of Speech Codes because they have a clear history going back to the Soviet Union where speech was very carefully monitored, and offenders were put in the Gulags. It's no accident that Ivan D. got eight years hard labor for having told a joke about Stalin... Jokes were almost totally outlawed in Zhdanov's Social Realism. One gets the sense that jokes within the nouveau communism (which pretends to be the new liberalism, but is anything but) are almost invariably frowned upon as hurtful.

Who's to decide? Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the best response to bad speech was good speech. Plato and Stalin (on the other hand) felt that the One should decide for the Many. Here at LS we believe that OW Holmes is the more salubrious of the two and that freedom of speech is vital to our project!

I think poetry would be better if it cooled it with the attempt to curtail freedom of speech and instead just spilled over into Rabelaisian grotsqueries in which greater and greater forms of uglinesses were not only permitted but encouraged and there was no attempt at all to teach but rather the mode of delight was turned up full blast. Then maybe I could stand to read poetry again. Right now it's all nice thoughts, and there's nothing in there to break up the boredom. Since Plato there has been this attempt to get poetry and its fans to behave, and to stay within some square ideological deal set out by some benign imperatrix or another. Could poetry please bust out into Rabelaisian populism?

Could comments boxes?

Ron has made many remarks in favor of Jefferson and such but were they just appetizers and the main course total suppression of dissent? I'd like him to prove that Pol Pot is his truest colleague, not Jefferson. Pol Pot said to the prisoners in Prison 17 (or am I thinking of Stalag 17?) that even to roll over in their sleep without permission would lead to a hundred lashes. 3 prisoners of some 14,000 processed in that prison survived it. Perhaps they had mastered the art of sleeping without movement, or they had actually gotten their written requests into the state for permission to turn over. Only problem: the ability to write was itself sentenced by capital punishment! Catch-22 at Prison 17!

So much for freedom under the reds.

Excuse me for the joke, but here goes: What's black and white and red all over?

Ans. Silliman's comments box.

SEE YOU

Fia says Bye Bye
See you!
Waves her hand

A year & a half old

Then she waddles out of the kitchen
Comes back five seconds later
Peeks her head around kitchen corner

Bends over forward
Wags her finger
See you!

Then waddles away again.



Thanksgiving 2007.

The Mice Cube

This mouse trap is called a Mice Cube. You put a cheese cracker with a bit of peanut butter on it inside the trap. Holes in the trap allow the scent to pervade a room. Then the mouse enters, enticed. You see the swinging door at the front? The mouse opens the one-way door, and goes for the cracker. At that point the mouse realizes he or she is trapped because the door only opens inward.

Lately we have had a mouse in our house. The kids left the front door open when they were playing outside. (It's been fifty degrees most of the week.) I was down in the basement doing laundry and saw the mouse. We haven't had a mouse in this house before and I didn't want the mice to move in here. I went to the store and found about a dozen varieties of traps. There were traditional traps that slammed shut, killing the mouse. There were also traps that led the mouse into a maze of poison. These traps were too dangerous to have in the house with a baby and plus I didn't want to deal with a dead mouse. I couldn't bear either to kill it, or to deal with the carcass.

So then I saw this Mice Cube, made by a company in New Hampshire. It cost $1.49. I bought one, baited it with a cheese cracker and peanut butter as suggested, and in the morning the mouse was in the trap. I walked the mouse about a mile into the woods and set it near a stone fence, and then poked the door open with a long stick. The mouse, who had his eyes pinned on me during this entire event, for some reason reminded me of Allen Ginsberg. He had this saintly kind of mischief about him. Oddly, its eyes seemed to be almost on the top of its head, looking up at me quietly.

Once out of the trap, the mouse never looked back. I watched as he bounded toward the stone fence. Tiny as the mouse appeared to be while in the Cube, it now seemed to expand and looked almost like a rat, with an enormous round butt bobbing and weaving in the wild grass.

This is a neat trap. It caused no harm, and it was inexpensive, and the mechanism is almost hilariously simple. Lutheran Surrealism endorses the Mice Cube. It is made in Newcastle, New Hampshire by Pied Piper International. I'm not sure how extensive product placement has been for the Mice Cube, but I found this in a Wal-Mart in Oneonta, New York.

Happy Thanksgiving, Rat!

Race, Gender, Class

I think that no one understands that the Democrats are no longer liberals. They're communists. It's been forty years since the communists started the long march through the institutions, and today they are fully in control of the Democratic party. Race, gender, and class (Marxist constructs that come out of Marxist thinkers such as SdB and the Frankfurt school and so on and so forth) dominate the Democratic party. When you look at three front-runners, this is obvious.

Sometimes watching their debates it appears that even they don't know that they have switched out of Locke and Madison, so demented have they become, so fully hijacked and vampyrized and lobotomized. Meanwhile, many of the Republicans are still talking straight out of Locke and Madison. Rudy Giuliani, for instance, is almost a pure classical liberal. He doesn't even have a trace of the Calvinist theocratic fascism that radiates out of the very far right of that party, and threatens to zombify it. W., as A.E. Newman as he was, at least had his bearings right. He was nominally a Calvinist but that was a patina on what remained and was still a purebred liberal straight out of Locke and Madison, and so to my mind he was preferable to the zombified Kerry who was a communist nightmare.I have always been and will always remain a purebred liberal out of the Locke and Madison school (Madison is crucial and not merely an addendum because of the 1st amendment that blocks any establishment of religion which Locke would have otherwise wanted). Madison, unlike Marx, wanted a country in which different factions, different parties, would be able to compete. Marx wanted to obliterate all opposition and establish a single party. That kind of violent self-righteousness is what one hears today from the communists including Ron Silliman who wants to establish one group even within poetry and to abolish all opposition (Silliman is a very light case of communism -- in academia you meet it in its pure form where there is absolutely no tolerance for diversity of thought whatsoever). There are many people who think or have thought as I do. Not just Orwell. But Hannah Arendt, for instance, who argued that "terror plus logic" was what communism stood for (thanks to Carl Sachs for forwarding this bit). JF Lyotard said that the entire philosophy stemming from Hegel-Marx was totalitarian at its inception and would never be anything else. Arendt and Lyotard: pure liberals, like me. There's only a handful of us holding the pass at Thermopylae against the dumb hordes of Marxists. Join us, and die at the hands of the communist zealots!

HUNGER IN AMERICA

Thumbing through the morning's post I came upon an article that claimed that 35 million Americans have "known hunger" over the last year. To my mind, that's not enough. I know it every day! To lose weight I don't think anyone can do more than just going hungry for a few hours at a time. For instance, I have been dieting lately (I've lost four pounds!), and I'm constantly hungry as a result. I have one friend -- a stockbroker in Philly -- who tells me the secret is to not eat bread. One should only eat meat without fat, he claims, citing someone named Atkins. I looked up Atkins and he died of a heart attack after he passed the four-hundred pound mark. Others claim that one should eat only egg-whites.

I have no secrets. I've tried everybody's secrets. My own secret is to go without food for a few hours at a time. I'm contemplating going without food for a whole day in solidarity with those throughout the world who have no food, but I find that I can't make it. The most I can do is about six hours. And I'm doing it entirely out of love of my own image in the mirror.

I figure if you're not eating any food, you will get lighter. It's a law of nature, isn't it? I can see my chin again, which is a good thing, but what a high price I'm paying!

Believe me, hunger hurts. It must have been meant by nature to get people off their duff and function. My duff of course tends to guide me to the candy machine which are spaced through out the town at liberal (one could almost say matriarchal!) spacings. But I've discovered that if I drink some terrible calorie-free beverage instead of porking my face full of empty calories (my favorite is to eat the "fat-free pretzels" that cost 85 cents and are maddeningly delicious) then I can keep off about 300 calories. Plus I have a step-counter from Wal-Mart ($2.50), and I try to take 10,000 steps every day. It's remarkably easy to achieve this with your feet if you're lucky enough to have them. You just walk in place while watching the Science channel -- say a hilarious episode about some poor sod who decides to staple his stomach bag so that it can only take in one-fourth of the ordinary calories -- and after watching the entire episode I've taken about 9,000 steps and I feel triumphant.

But I haven't exactly become thin. I am at 181 pounds for the last two weeks and I can't seem to get to 179. My ultimate goal is 171!! There is no one step that one must take toward becoming thin. A journey of 10,000 steps must begin with one. And then another, and another, and another, until you are firming up! But I am likely at any moment to go down on all fours and gobble gobble gobble like a turkey. And meanwhile Thanksgiving with its high calorie boosts of gravy and buttered dishes and pumpkin pie threatens, and then there are the Christmas parties and the candies and sweets and odd dishes people make that they just insist you try, dear. The trick apparently is take a small plate full and then get through it somehow watching the others shovel it all down. Mimetic desire entails that too often one joins in, and then suffers when the scales offer anything but justice!

Meanwhile, people without food in America are way ahead of the game in a certain sense. The article claimed that the truly poor must often go without food for one day a month. (The article didn't say if anybody had actually starved to death in America in the 21st century -- but I would be surprised if this was true.)

So while the rest of the world struggles for a basic food distribution system (famines apparently only occur in one-party systems according to Nobel economist Amartya Sen) so I am stepping, and riding a stationary bicycle, and trying my darnedest to keep from going down on all fours and going hog wild over some devil's food cake or another that some malicious company or another has put on the market to tempt me into sinful indulgence. I have actually prayed to God to help me with this.

It's no piece of cake, but with the help of Jesus, perhaps I can one day be as thin as Him.

Terms that Have TOO Much Slippage

Homeless
Mentally ill
Lutheran
Surrealist
Poetry
Matriarchy/Patriarchy
Progressive
Conservative
Reactionary
Marxism
Art
Insanity/Sanity
Surrealism/Realism
SoQ
Feminism
New Age


Ok, I think I'll have to stop. After that last word my eyes turned inside out and rolled out of my head and it took me ten minutes fishing around on the floor before I found them.

We prefer concrete clear terminology:

Instead of insane, we'd like to read "pistachio nut."
Instead of Conservative we'd like to read "Reaganite."
Instead of Progressive we'd like to read "tie-dyed t-shirt crowd that never washes."
Instead of Matriarchy we'd like to read "no morals and dances on nightclub tables without a stitch."

This is not to say that we don't believe in abstraction. Abstraction has its place. But we have to always attempt to bring abstractions back into alignment with sensory data that helps us to ground the abstraction, so as to test its bouquet, its tendency.

HOMELESS PEOPLE ARE NOT ANIMALS: True or False

There are apparently 754,000 homeless people in America. New York City had 6,503 such people in 2006. There is a further definition called "chronically homeless" which pertains to about 155,600 people. In order to be considered "chronically homeless," one must have "been living continuously on the streets for at least a year," or to "have been homeless at least four times in the past three years."

Now get this part. "They also have to have a disability, often mental illness or substance abuse."

This is from an article in the Oneonta Star that appeared on Thursday, November 8, 2007, on p. 24. The article is entitled "Fewer Chronically Homeless in U.S."

About one in four of the homeless are veterans. This includes a number from the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns (ca. 1500). Some of these have turned their lives around due to the intervention of The National Alliance to End Homelessness. One of the Iraq veterans is now a stock broker who has made a killing on the stock market. Another has applied to become a police officer.

I knew that there were homeless people because I see them whenever I go to New York City. You have to step over them as they sit in cardboard boxes with a cup in their hand. Sometimes I admit that I suspect that they are faking it in order to get change, as in one of Balzac's books where the homeless of Paris at the end of the day take off all their fake stumps and go back to their ward to party down past midnight. I occasionally put my change into their cup, but I wonder if they are just drug addicts and whether I am enabling this lifestyle when I donate. The definition of "chronically homeless" seems to confirm this: that by definition they must be using drugs or be out of their minds (one thing leads to another).

I had an argument with a poet who claimed to have been homeless at Ron Silliman's blog about a month ago. I asked him if he was insane. He said no. But BY DEFINITION, you have to be insane in order to be considered chronically homeless. But perhaps he wasn't "chronically" homeless. The article says, "They have to have a disability, often mental illness or substance abuse." Since this poet (who remained anonymous throughout the encounter) was not a drug user, then he has to have had a mental illness in order to have been considered chronically homeless. So if he was chronically homeless, he was mentally ill. It's a tautology, and now I see that the newspaper has confirmed my belief in this matter. However, what if he wasn't chronically homeless, but just temporarily homeless? What if he had lost his keys or something?

Is it possible that the definition of "homelessness" needs to be expanded or improved upon? The poet at Ron's blog was not necessarily mentally ill, but then in that case how could he have been homeless unless he was also heavily involved in drugs? But why must that condition of being crazy attend the definition of being homeless? Who thought this up? When I look at the homeless they do appear to me to be largely mentally ill and they do seem to be drugged up. But being homeless might in itself be enough to drive you crazy. Even animals have homes, unless of course your forest has been turned into a subdivision. Which might in turn create a certain kind of homelessness, and in turn, a certain kind of insanity.

Investigative Poetry

Poetry must explore the world or else what good is it?

The surrealists explored the unreality of the unconscious, and used that exploration to posit the notion that man is a creature of unlimited potential who has been limited by reason.

Luther explored the reality of the Catholic church of his day, and posited the notion that man is a creature of unlimited depravity, and that the Pope was Satan Himself.

Topics that lie before LS:

1. Are there truly mountain lions in the Catskills? Should it be news? Almost every week there is another siting reported to me, and I don't know that many people. Perhaps twenty people that I know pretty well, and another hundred people who report to me at least once a month. Last week a local contractor that I was sitting with at the elementary school Halloween ball told me that a man whose porch he was fixing up in Halcottsville saw a cougar.

He also told me that the Gerry estate over in Lake Delaware is going to be transformed into a major casino thanks to the new mandate from Democratic governor Elliott Spitzer to turn New York State into a gambling mecca. At least 50 condos will be placed on the Gerry estate if that initiative goes through. But Spitzer is himself being investigated for ethics violations in that he had illegal wiretaps on his Republican rival and so right now he isn't able to get too much accomplished. Now Spitzer has pushed for driver's licenses for illegal aliens. This has again created a bizarre climate where law appears to be used to dignify illegality.

Is this level of thing the place for poetry?

Investigative Poetry is something cooked up by Ed Sanders out of the work of the Objectivists and WCW and Charles Olson's projective verse. I. Poetry gives poetry something to do. You track criminals. Perhaps Sanders' chief work in this regard was his book The Family, about the Manson family. You do indeed get a lot of details on that bunch of murderous vixens, but what is the thesis? Simply that they were not hippies? It seems that Sanders was upset about the Manson image having been superimposed on the hippies. Is I. Poetry, like Investigative Journalism (muckrakers) always tied to exposing and expositing evil?

Tom Clark investigated poetry itself with his masterpiece, The Great Naropa Poetry Wars. He claimed that there were all kinds of shenanigans afoot within poetry. Naropa had taken on a criminal guru from Tibet as their tyrannous leader. Clark offered Tom Pain as a rejoinder, and the notion of journalism as being one that poetry should not reject. Why then not simply practice journalism? Clark also fingerpointed at Ron Padgett as a gangster for having helped his group of insiders secure poetry grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, -- eschewing all notion of fairness and simply dishing out benefits to his cronies.

Does poetry matter as a thing in and of itself, or should it extravert in this way, and turn to an examination of marriage, church and government? Already there is a move underfoot under the communists to investigate race, gender and class, but nothing positive seems to be inspected. I would instead like to reaffirm where it's possible the three Lutheran orders using the Ten Commandments as a system of values for that investigation.

Tom Clark's disjointed book The Empire of Skin is an odd investigation of the Haida tribe of the upper Northwest coast. What is the thesis? Is there one? I think he forgot to have one at all. Pound did have a thesis in his Cantos which is that Jewish usury has wrecked western Kultur. The thesis is wrong, I think (almost everyone except for a handful that might goosestep through Peoria thinks) but the thesis does at least make the epic poem cohere around an arguable assertion.

Canonical poetry creates arguable assertions. It's one of the hallmarks of a classic. In every Shakespeare play for instance there are powerfully argued POINTS. Homer's point in the Iliad and the Odyssey seems to be that marriage is the very center of civilization and that if we don't get it right, there will be hellish wars that last for decades. That peace begins at home, whether in Ithaca or in Troy, and that it must be founded on marriage, rather than on hellish desire that knows no boundaries. From the very beginning of the poem until the end marriage is at the forefront -- it begins at the wedding party to which Eric (goddess of strife) had not been invited. I follow Bachofen as to the secret key to the epic, but as usual, he's right! When Paris and Helen take off from another party and consort behind the gates of Troy, it sets off a catastrophic battle that brings both civilizations to their knees.

Have poets forgotten that poems should have a point? Is that part of why poetry is so boring these days?

Ginsberg's peculiar diatribes in Howl and elsewhere against the US government as a latter-day Moloch are probably only taken in by very stupid poetry fans (which are legion). America isn't Moloch. Ginsberg was himself Moloch, and he projected this on to America. His later poems in Fame & Death prove that he was a Nambla perv, and that he lived to destroy the lives of children, which is exactly what he claimed the American government was doing.

LS' investigation thus far has been to try to reassert the supremacy of the Lockean liberal political mode over the communist priapic mode (Breton fell for this briefly, but never succeeded in moving from investigative of dreams to investigation of Marxism, whereas Soupault became a love poet and used "liberty" as the paradigm for his poetry). But part of the Lockean liberal mode (a fact more or less eclipsed these days) was also to argue that only Christians could really understand that mode, and that only Christians should therefore be welcome within it. The doctrine of the separation of the church and state has been a disaster in terms of occluding Locke's basic foundations. The separation appears in a letter of Jefferson's, and was never official government policy. The phrasing in the Second Amendment having to do with no establishment meant only that no one CHRISTIAN denomination should be official. Madison never wanted to imply that government ITSELF should be separate from the Christian God.

In my own poetry I have sought to resurrect an examination of parental feeling in regard to children as a possible topic for poetry. Many have claimed that family life is ipso facto evil, and that the nuclear family should be exploded as a feudal relic of an outmoded order (odor). I have instead focused on marvelous moments of connection with family and church as moments representative of a poetry of the Lutheran orders that reaffirms marriage as the central order, and church as a necessary component. Government has not been dealt with (at least not much), perhaps because to some degree I too feel that government hasn't been working.

But the alternative is the kind of Molochian haetarism inscribed by Ginsberg's horde in which the desire of the tyrannous strong is unleashed on the weak. I totally reject this as worthy of celebration.

Perhaps one place to move in terms of the poetry to come from LS is to choose to document moments when governors, mayors, etc. are doing their job. Because they do do their job in the vast majority of cases. Problem: the mayors that I know who tell me inside stuff might stop talking to me if they find out I'm using what they say as source material. I know the mayor of Oneonta and have lunch with him twice a week. He's also my dean. I know the mayor of Delhi, too, and talk with him whenever I can. He lives down the street and drives a Volvo and is a very good man. Are my discussions with these men straw that can be ethically turned to gold so as to keep the Rumpelstiltskins of the left at bay?

All I can tell you is that the impulse to govern is not as pernicious as I once thought.
The mayors that I know really do want to do what is right whether it means snow removal, or getting flowers into tiny parks, or putting a small pedestrian bridge across the Delaware with a kiosk about local bird life on the other side, or sidelining the criminal element and reducing the number of Nambla predators in the village. The civic impulse is not Satanic as the communists claim. It is a real impulse to do what is right for the aggregate.

Should we have a sidewalk here? Should we push our strapped finances to order new awnings for the village's dwindling businesses at village expense, or should we order all the dwindling businesses to fork over 2 grand to spruce up the town? These small questions can help a polis: or hinder it. Government provides an awning under which proper businesses can either grow, or else relocate to some god-forsaken clime.

Perhaps this isn't the stuff of poetry. Then again, perhaps it is the very basis of poetry. The three orders and how they are reflected in the microcosm of a small settlement in the western Catskills: it seems to be what I want to investigate now.

Against the Sadean Left

The great project of French modernism was to release all repressed forces or agents and to massacre the church-sponsored state that seemed to them to have locked shut the lid of the Pandora's box of revolution. Having opened the box after the French Revolution

Race,
Gender,
Class,
Insanity,
Bad Hygiene,
Sexuality of every kind (including child molestation)

All of these were to come out of the box with Nadja (in Russian the name means Hope).

Freud's idea that we would abolish the work day and instantiate permanent revels (the end of all taboos was said in Totem & Taboo to usher in a permanent holiday),

Marx's erasure of the upper class through the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as it was called in the C. Manifesto, calls as well for a permanent holiday, but this

Has led to a crisis. If Man Ray painted Sade's pleasure at the burning of the Bastille, then we should also see Luther's gaze as he watches the City of God burnt to the ground by the utopian left. The choice is between the leftist Sade, and the man of God Luther.

To unleash the id is monstrous. To unleash the lower classes so that they can decapitate the upper classes (what the Khmer Rouge did to the educated in Cambodia), is bad.

We urge instead a turn from the convulsive tearing down of the riotous revolutionaries of Sade and surrealism and communist insurrection TOWARD a return of marriage, church, and government.

It has been seventy five years since Sade was first feted by the surrealists, and now we watch as child molesters walk, divorce rates exceed 90%, police are badmouthed, and syntax is stretched.

LS is on the ramparts, calling for a return to order. The festival of the id that culminated in the sinful life of the Marquis de Sade (Simone de Beauvoir calls him a great moralist!) shows us the best that the left has to offer. The Christian west cries out for order against this chaos.

The fundamental disorder wreaking havoc in our society is the problematic distinction between patriarchy and matriarchy. Teach Yourself Greek Myths, tells us of these distinctions between matriarchy and patriarchy.

Matriarchy is the law of nature, while patriarchy is based on heaven-sent laws.
Matriarchy is feeling, while patriarchy is rationalist.
Matriarchy is passive acceptance of nature, while patriarchy controls nature.


(p. 37)

Sade is not quite a matriarch in Bachofen's terms, much less is he the quintessential matriarch. Bachofen argues that there is a level even lower than matriarchy in which "the male is still dominant; every tribe is headed by its tyrannos" and that this is found in "conjunction with the extreme degradation of woman" (143). Nowhere is rule by men said however to be the essence of patriarchy. Patriarchy is law and order, the ten commandments, liberties and responsibilities, checks and balances, marriage, church, and government. Preceding matriarchy is tyranny in which individual feeling predominates, and the Sadean Minotaur is the symbol. Marriage is the rise of Hera, and the notion that pure male tyranny is broken. Symbolically, the west has made a precipitous turn, due to a wilfully catastrophic misreading of Bachofen. Because above matriarchy is civil law, instantiated by the coming of the sky gods, and the notion that there are transcendent and universal principles or laws. Against mere feeling, Bachofen has posed marriage as the litmus test of a society's cultivation. The lowest societies use women as whores or as ashtrays because the materialist emphasis predominates. ("The lowest of all orders of creation is that of Aphroditean desire" (190). The highest societies sanction marriage because the religious emphasis predominates. Marriage represents a curtailment of Tom's bestial natural law. The way in which the weaker party is treated determines the level of society.

Bachofen sees the marriage principle as the basis for the Trojan War. Helen and Paris break her marriage vows to Menelaus, but even within her marriage to Menelaus she is not treated as an equal partner. Contrasted with this is Odysseus' marriage to Penelope. Emancipation from the "crudely sensual animal life" (143) first begins under matriarchy, but it finds its truest expression in "purely spiritual father right" (147) in which "just laws" prevail over the "material side of our human nature" (147).

The left has turned not to Odysseus but to Sade who uses women as if he wants to destroy all of creation itself. The right urges us not to seek glee in the burning of our traditions, or in the return of the satanic Sade to the canon but the left chortles fiendishly and insists, laughing at the prudery of the right. If we are Christian we look to the right (away from the id and toward the paternal superego) and we must resurrect all taboos surrounding sexuality, and maintain the phrase "complete depravity" in regards to basic human nature. Against nature we must pose the safeguards of Christian thought: walls and boundaries, police and surveillance, order and care not to sin, as we recathect the ten commandments, and the Final Judgment of God.

QUOTES FROM BACHOFEN (appendix):

"There is only one mighty lever of all civilization and that is religion" (85).

"The exclusivity of the marriage bond seems essential to the nobility and higher calling of human nature" (93).

"The initial determined resistance to the bestial state of sexual promiscuity is woman's. It is woman who artfully or forcefully puts an end to this degrading state. The staff is wrenched from the male, the woman becomes the master. This transition is inconceivable without individual marriage" (142).

"Hera makes use of the dance to check the excessive manhood of her wild son Ares. This principle of harmonious movement is contained in marriage, whose rigorous law is upheld by women... In a noteworthy passage Strabo imputes this culture-bringing benign power of woman to fear of God, which first dwelled in woman and which she implanted in the men" (144).

Quotes from Myth, Religion, and Mother Right (Princeton UP, 1967).