If I didn't write anything yesterday that's all LA Confidential Pantload's fault: in the comments to the last post he directed me to A Reactionary's Shorter Catechism, a Red State front page enumeration of Conservative first principles co-authored by Paul J. Cella and Maximos, whose tag-team literary style is to good prose what sumo wrestling is to Swan Lake.
It's a ghastly piece of work. And not only in the style, but also the substance. You can dress up 21st century bigotry in 18th century wigs and top-boots, amigos, but ugly is ugly, and that shit is ugly. Ugly enough so that it's worth something of a closer look beyond the usual snarkage, because it's symptomatically ugly: contemporary "conservative thought" there shambles past, its fluids adrip, skin sagging grotesquely, rheumy eyeballs rolling, chunks of tongue tumbling out as it savagely lisps its implacable hatred of wetbacks and fags.
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The first sign that you're in for something unforgivable comes in the title, with the word "Shorter." The fucking thing is 1400 words long. (We've previously witnessed Cella begin a 124 word sentence with the phrase "in short," you'll recall.) Then you get the turgidity, the sloppiness, the vapidity:
--There is great peril in the reckless use reason to pry into the
nonrational aspects of our history and traditions: like Noah’s son
looking upon his nakedness, the brazenness of reason my issue in ruin.
This "great peril" is probably a bit less to worry about than the reckless use of tinfoil in microwave ovens, though, or even the reckless refusal to proofread your "catechism." What our friends mean here is that it's just bad form to ask why Our Noble American Traditions have historically included stuff like slavery, oppression, silly wars, imbecile patriarchal laws, and the like. But they can't just come out and say all this, because by now it's recognized by everyone who isn't nuts that such arguments are stupid. Hence, our amigos rely on utterly meaningless abstractions:
--Human nature is not elastic, but rather constant; and the corrupt aspects will always be with us.
There is, of course, no such fucking thing as "human nature," or if there is, the concept is so broad as to be analytically and categorically useless. Everyone wants to eat, drink, fuck, shit, piss, sleep, win, and survive, but the social and cultural valences these impulses possess vary wildly from place to place. Even our Heroes concede this:
--Cultures and civilizations vary widely and profoundly, not only in
customs, but in terms of mindsets, ways of seeing the world, and
potential for humane achievements.
But what they don't want to do is admit that this might apply historically within the same "culture and civilization." "Human nature," you see, varies from place to place, but not from time to time. That's some non-elasticity!
But consistency is not the point; sneering at a Straw Liberal, that's what gets them stroking. What Max & Cel want is to discredit Progress as an ideal:
--If progress occurs at all, it is slow, unsteady and often obscure.
--The misuse of the label progress has concealed some of the most terrible political calamities in history; the very word has been rendered untrustworthy.
Aw. Chin up, lads! Perhaps you're still steamed about, say, women getting the franchise, or child labor laws, or the end of Jim Crow, but such Progress makes the rest of us feel rather chipper. (We'll also be pretty relaxed about ending the poorly planned military excursion in Iraq, and perhaps about doing something positive in regards to the whole global warming bother.)
Such historical and material specificity is anathema in this Catechism. What we get instead are decrepit nationalist platitudes perched atop a familiar, if shaky, racialist base, as in "The political realm is the expression of a people’s will-to-survive, and their desire to perpetuate themselves and their culture," or, even more entertainingly:
--A healthy polity will have a majority population and culture;
contemporary orthodoxy on diversity tends towards anarchy and strife.
--The right of a community to maintain its identity, autonomy, and independence is among the first principles of a free polity.
That first bit about a "majority culture" is kind of a downer for me myself, since I think American Idol sucks. Though that's not quite what I think they have in mind. What they mean is, "Mexicans suck ass." By a "majority culture," well, that's white, straight, butch, Christian. No? No? Are we somehow no longer in the 19th century? Lord forbid.
The whole piece is sad. It's a desperate attempt to pretend that there are actual intellectual underpinnings to what is a transparently ersatz identity formation: there aren't even any decent invented traditions that shore up this internetty, talk-radio phenomenon. Read the thread and look what our geniuses are reduced to: pretending that gay marriage and a rational immigration policy are race suicide; pretending that Islamicists are everywhere; and defending the fucking Alien and Sedition Acts. (Cella really does this, I shit you not.)
This is why they write so badly, of course. The inflated style pinch hits for the exalted social and cultural position they don't inhabit, and never will.
Sorry, boys.
ADDED: Given the Burke fetish 21st century "conservatives" have going on, as well as the stench of spilt Thomism all over this "Catechism," I'm put in mind of Yeats, a kinda-conservative who himself liked to invoke Burke -- especially after the founding of the Irish Free State when it became quite clear that the newly empowered Catholic bourgeoisie had no use for such "traditions." But Yeats could of course write well -- what's Cella's excuse?
ALSO ADDED: Maximos speaks:
Tradition is indeed logically and ontologically prior to law, which is
the effort of the community to protect and secure tradition, from which
it follows that tradition - and here we refer to tradition concerning
the fundamental basis of civilization, and to tradition concerning
cuisine - that never achieves legal recognition is naught but an
abortion. And as for the passions, which I take to be disordered
appetites, or appetites indulged beyond licit measure, I'd rather they
not achieve positive status in law; hence, my opposition to "marriage
reform", be it same-sex unions or the "privatization" of marriage.
Or, "I hate fags." Gay as a cucumber, this one. Talk about your Jesuit strains injected backwards...
FINAL UPDATE: My own definition of "tradition" is "a bunch of people making up lies about the past, something that's fun when you have good booze and Irish music, but is anyway a shitty fucking basis for an ontology."
But apart from that, it wouldn't work. Liberal blog comments are contentious enough already: who would notice? It would be like throwing a ninja in with a lot of other ninjas who are doing all sorts of, like, ninja stuff. Throwing stars and smoke bombs and Lee Van Cleef and shit! Whee!