Lol at the vampire comics. Agreed about decline:the fall-primordial or of our time- seems to be a part of human psychology as much as any outward reality. I liked that Smith thing, I’ve heard (from grizzled old historians of the nineteenth century) bad things about Foote’s books as history, but Blake makes a solid case for them as aesthetic objects, and Foote is another case for his file about closets. I’ll need to know more about what his argument is about honor before I nod along with it-I mostly know the Nietzsche-Strauss version of that view and I don’t put much stock in that. And yes, tumblr is such fun in its undeath, isn’t it?
Re: honor: for some sensibilities it's just too undignified to theatrically and absolutely disown whatever brought you to birth, to make that disavowal, rather than a complex wrestling with your lineage, the basis of your identity. It's also usually dishonest. In place of Foote's saying he would have fought for the south, think of Camus saying he chooses justice over his mother (when the Algerian nationalists were putting bombs on buses like the ones his mother regularly rode). Or like the way the arbiters of social justice today are always saying you need to berate and disown your reactionary family members. But my reactionary family members wiped my ass when I was zero and put me through college when I was 18. What have the socially just ever done for me that's remotely comparable—at least recently, after they plucked all the low-hanging fruit? The "honor" principle has its limit, obviously, and ideally you want to reconcile your local and global commitments, but for most people, honor will do.
Right, no I understand *that*-by Nietzsche-Strauss I meant more in the sense of that honor being won through a kind of heroic bloodlust that must be satiated for civilizational survival etc. Your definition I can get behind- family isn’t nothing, even if you don’t always want to be around them. Certainly about wrestling with lineage as well-I don’t have the kind of bloodstained Puritan officer class ancestry of a Hawthorne or a Pynchon, but I have a similarly long New England history with all the implications in the ancestral crimes of the region in the nation that brings, and I think that’s certainly worth wrestling with!
Ah, I see...yes, that goes too far for me too. Why I'm always trying to drive people from Nietzsche back to Emerson is that the honor and glory are for *yourself,* not civilization—a mindset that paradoxically is better for your civilization and probably has something to do with why Emerson's side, though it had the less honor, won the war.
(With the working-class to petit-bourgeois Ellis Island heritage, the "ancestral crime" is to have started voting Republican sometime between 1968 and 1980. And as you've seen, I am ambivalent about Nixon; can scarcely bring myself to say a word against Trump himself, as opposed to his obviously flawed movement; and will even allow that Reagan is my fellow Aquarius, both of us born on the same date and sharing not entirely opposed sensibilities, including the affinity for Emerson. The Bushes can rot in hell, though.)
Ditto on Emerson. Nixon is very easy to be ambivalent about- he’s got this Shakespearean tragic quality about him, and he’s maybe the last Republican president (Ford being a virtual nonentity for our purposes) who seemed able to imagine a reality outside of free market idealism. I took a seminar course on Reagan in undergrad, remember thinking that he seemed to mentally inhabit a very simple, almost fairytale world. Bush sr. is interesting as the end of a kind of patrician civically minded business Republican, but everything else about him and his son? Yeah. Trump I’m sure you know I share my class’s distaste for, but I try not to get too deranged about lol
I hadn’t seen that, lol indeed. Bannon wasn’t great for trump once he actually got in power (although frankly I’m not sure there’s a way to keep his 2016 juice once he’s in the oval office) but ditching all those campaign guys really hurt him in the long run. The more he lost that carnivalesque affect as his presidency went on the worst off he got, and just being an erratic but otherwise typical Republican didn’t work out too well in 20
Lol at the vampire comics. Agreed about decline:the fall-primordial or of our time- seems to be a part of human psychology as much as any outward reality. I liked that Smith thing, I’ve heard (from grizzled old historians of the nineteenth century) bad things about Foote’s books as history, but Blake makes a solid case for them as aesthetic objects, and Foote is another case for his file about closets. I’ll need to know more about what his argument is about honor before I nod along with it-I mostly know the Nietzsche-Strauss version of that view and I don’t put much stock in that. And yes, tumblr is such fun in its undeath, isn’t it?
Re: honor: for some sensibilities it's just too undignified to theatrically and absolutely disown whatever brought you to birth, to make that disavowal, rather than a complex wrestling with your lineage, the basis of your identity. It's also usually dishonest. In place of Foote's saying he would have fought for the south, think of Camus saying he chooses justice over his mother (when the Algerian nationalists were putting bombs on buses like the ones his mother regularly rode). Or like the way the arbiters of social justice today are always saying you need to berate and disown your reactionary family members. But my reactionary family members wiped my ass when I was zero and put me through college when I was 18. What have the socially just ever done for me that's remotely comparable—at least recently, after they plucked all the low-hanging fruit? The "honor" principle has its limit, obviously, and ideally you want to reconcile your local and global commitments, but for most people, honor will do.
Right, no I understand *that*-by Nietzsche-Strauss I meant more in the sense of that honor being won through a kind of heroic bloodlust that must be satiated for civilizational survival etc. Your definition I can get behind- family isn’t nothing, even if you don’t always want to be around them. Certainly about wrestling with lineage as well-I don’t have the kind of bloodstained Puritan officer class ancestry of a Hawthorne or a Pynchon, but I have a similarly long New England history with all the implications in the ancestral crimes of the region in the nation that brings, and I think that’s certainly worth wrestling with!
Ah, I see...yes, that goes too far for me too. Why I'm always trying to drive people from Nietzsche back to Emerson is that the honor and glory are for *yourself,* not civilization—a mindset that paradoxically is better for your civilization and probably has something to do with why Emerson's side, though it had the less honor, won the war.
(With the working-class to petit-bourgeois Ellis Island heritage, the "ancestral crime" is to have started voting Republican sometime between 1968 and 1980. And as you've seen, I am ambivalent about Nixon; can scarcely bring myself to say a word against Trump himself, as opposed to his obviously flawed movement; and will even allow that Reagan is my fellow Aquarius, both of us born on the same date and sharing not entirely opposed sensibilities, including the affinity for Emerson. The Bushes can rot in hell, though.)
Ditto on Emerson. Nixon is very easy to be ambivalent about- he’s got this Shakespearean tragic quality about him, and he’s maybe the last Republican president (Ford being a virtual nonentity for our purposes) who seemed able to imagine a reality outside of free market idealism. I took a seminar course on Reagan in undergrad, remember thinking that he seemed to mentally inhabit a very simple, almost fairytale world. Bush sr. is interesting as the end of a kind of patrician civically minded business Republican, but everything else about him and his son? Yeah. Trump I’m sure you know I share my class’s distaste for, but I try not to get too deranged about lol
Btw, don't know if you saw this, but the "Woke MAGA Brutalism" is through the roof here:
https://twitter.com/RogerJStoneJr/status/1697513070505967835
I hadn’t seen that, lol indeed. Bannon wasn’t great for trump once he actually got in power (although frankly I’m not sure there’s a way to keep his 2016 juice once he’s in the oval office) but ditching all those campaign guys really hurt him in the long run. The more he lost that carnivalesque affect as his presidency went on the worst off he got, and just being an erratic but otherwise typical Republican didn’t work out too well in 20