Category Archives: English

The Gatwick Archipelago: Savagery On-The-Thames

Britain, English, Etiquette, Europe, Homeland Security, Racism, Regulation, The State, The West

In civilized Singapore, as opposed to savage Gatwick, ‘any airport staffer who even hinted at attempting such behavior towards the general public would incur serious jail time at best, and a good hearty caning at worst’

My Australian book editor, for whose integrity I can vouch, reports as follows from the freakorama war zone of London airport “security”:

After 20 years of enduring the chief “entertainment” spectacle offered at America’s biggest international airports – namely, the enthusiasm with which certain uniformed security guards molest as many female passengers as they can while still avoiding formal charges of sexual assault – I thought that I was pretty much inured to anything that modern airport culture could inflict upon hapless travelers. I was wrong.

Why was I wrong? Because until this morning, I had never been to Gatwick in London.

The difference between even the worst TSA behavior stateside, and on the other hand what goes on at Gatwick, is like the difference between a teenage street punk and an Obergruppenführer. No, Gatwick’s uniformed thugs don’t inflict their sexual advances on anyone. And no, unlike the original Obergruppenführers, they don’t hate Jews more than they hate anyone else. They prefer to spend most of their working hours screaming apoplectically, in some lunatic patois that bears scarcely any relation to intelligible English.

I had to chaperone through Gatwick an octogenarian female acquaintance with intermittent dementia. Naturally I did not expect that anything remotely resembling actual politeness would be shown to her or me. I merely expected that I would be able to comprehend the putative English of the bellowing bullies who snatched away our passports without the smallest suggestion of saying “please”, since after all they were too busy shoving and pushing my octogenarian companion from wheelchair to trolley (she is also too lame to walk more than a few steps unaided).

Curiously enough, each time I asked them a perfectly civil question about how long they planned on delaying our exit from the airport, and why they were treating us – along with numerous other passengers – like common criminals, their bellowing abruptly stopped. Perhaps they had been suddenly stricken with deafness. An understandable bodily reaction to hearing their own screeching voices over, presumably, decades. (They were not, shall we say, characterized by obvious youthfulness.)

Similar silences greeted my polite requests for the location of the airport’s Uber access. I formed the conviction that at present-day Gatwick, Uber is the equivalent of a clandestine abortion clinic in Ireland circa 1954. All the locals know about it, but not one will admit to it, although the Hibernian analogy might well break down when one remembers that at least the Irish – unlike the People’s Republic of Gatwick’s commissars – can speak English.

Altogether it took a scarcely credible two and a half hours between the time we disembarked at Gatwick (following a 23-hour flight from Melbourne) and the time that we finally found an Uber driver prepared to transport my octogenarian companion to her London hotel. It should go without saying that several of the most obviously insolent staffers wore jackets emblazoned with the words “Happy to Help.”

Why must this petty thuggery against complete and harmless strangers occur at all? Doubtless people like my companion and myself are, admittedly, just cradle-to-grave losers in the wider scheme of things.

Yet among the millions of Gatwick arrivals being subjected to Third World ululations are, it is safe to assume, foreign businesspeople lured to England by modish cant about post-Brexit London being “Singapore-on-the-Thames.” What possible self-interest can be served by treating these foreign businesspeople as if they smelled like Boris Johnson’s vomit?

Earth to Gatwickians: you can gargle all you like about post-Brexit London being “Singapore-on-the-Thames.” But you need to remember that in the actual Singapore, any airport staffer who even hinted at attempting such behavior towards the general public would incur serious jail time at best, and a good hearty caning at worst.

For my part, my own mind is made up. Never, once my current visit to the British capital is over, will I dream of setting foot in London again.

I note, incidentally, that Paris’s population is comparable to London’s. And heaven knows, France’s recent experiences of terrorism have been in every respect more horrible.

But not a hint of Gatwick-style insolence did I detect last February at Paris’s Charles De Gaulle Airport. There, every staffer treated me with unfailing civility and decency, although no-one could claim that my spoken French was more than adequate.

Are not Parisian airport officials sometimes rude, impatient, brusque? Indeed yes: when they want to be. Especially when they need to interrogate certain members of the flying population, whom the officials have good reason to suspect of unhealthy interest in Bataclan renovating.

What I have never seen the slightest suggestion of, in Paris, is the state of utterly unconscious, generalized expectoration against the human race (I mean expectoration in the most literal, salivary sense) which is now the standard Gatwick default mode. France is a nation of realists, who perceive what disastrous public relations it would be if they gave all airport jobs to howling hoodlums.

One acknowledgment of contrition, nevertheless, I do owe regarding Gatwick. In a flash of impatience, when recounting the matter to a friend, I likened Gatwick to a zoo. This comparison was a disgusting libel on the animal kingdom, to which I hereby extend profuse apologies.

A July 4th Toast To Thomas Jefferson, Author of The Declaration, And The Anglo-Saxon Tradition

Classical Liberalism, English, Founding Fathers, Government, History, Political Philosophy

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‘Let us … toast Thomas Jefferson—and the Anglo-Saxon tradition that sired and inspired him’—ILANA MERCER, July 4, 2019

The Declaration of Independence—whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate—has been mocked out of meaning.

To be fair to the liberal Establishment, ordinary Americans are not entirely blameless. For most, Independence Day means firecrackers and cookouts. The Declaration doesn’t feature. In fact, contemporary Americans are less likely to read it now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.

Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. Printer John Dunlap had worked “through the night” to set the full text on “a handsome folio sheet,” recounts historian David Hackett Fischer in Liberty And Freedom. And President (of the Continental Congress) John Hancock urged that the “people be universally informed.”

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called it “an expression of the American Mind.” An examination of Jefferson‘s constitutional thought makes plain that he would no longer consider the mind of the collective mentality of the D.C. establishment “American” in any meaningful way. For the Jeffersonian mind was that of an avowed Whig—an American Whig whose roots were in the English Whig political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

By “all men are created equal,” Jefferson, who also wrote in praise of a “Natural Aristocracy,” did not imply that all men were similarly endowed. Or that they were entitled to healthcare, education, amnesty, and a decent wage, à la Obama.

Rather, Jefferson was affirming the natural right of “all men” to be secure in their enjoyment of their “life, liberty and possessions.”

This is the very philosophy Hillary Clinton explicitly disavowed during one of the mindless presidential debates of 2007. Asked by a YouTubester to define “liberal,” Hillary revealed she knew full-well that the word originally denoted the classical liberalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But she then settled on “progressive” as the appropriate label for her Fabian socialist plank.

Contra Clinton, as David N. Mayer explains in The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, colonial Americans were steeped in the writings of English Whigs—John Locke, Algernon Sidney, Paul Rapin, Thomas Gordon and others. The essence of this “pattern of ideas and attitudes,” almost completely lost today, was a view of government as an inherent threat to liberty and the necessity for eternal vigilance.

Jefferson, in particular, was adamant about the imperative “to be watchful of those in power,” a watchfulness another Whig philosopher explained thus: “Considering what sort of Creature Man is, it is scarce possible to put him under too many Restraints, when he is possessed of great Power.”

“As Jefferson saw it,” expounds Mayer, “the Whig, zealously guarding liberty, was suspicious of the use of government power,” and assumed “not only that government power was inherently dangerous to individual liberty but also that, as Jefferson put it, ‘the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.’”

For this reason, the philosophy of government that Jefferson articulated in the Declaration radically shifted sovereignty from parliament to the people.

But Jefferson‘s muse for the “American Mind” is even older.

The Whig tradition is undeniably Anglo-Saxon. Our founding fathers’ political philosophy originated with their Saxon forefathers, and the ancient rights guaranteed by the Saxon constitution. With the Declaration, Jefferson told Henry Lee in 1825, he was also protesting England‘s violation of her own ancient tradition of natural rights. As Jefferson saw it, the Colonies were upholding a tradition the Crown had abrogated.

Philosophical purist that he was, moreover, Jefferson considered the Norman Conquest to have tainted this English tradition with the taint of feudalism. “To the Whig historian,” writes Mayer, “the whole of English constitutional history since the Conquest was the story of a perpetual claim kept up by the English nation for a restoration of Saxon laws and the ancient rights guaranteed by those laws.”

If Jefferson begrudged the malign influence of the Normans on the natural law he cherished, imagine how he’d view our contemporary cultural conquistadors from the South, whose customs preclude natural rights and natural reason!

Naturally, Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.

The settlers spilt their own blood “in acquiring lands for their settlement,” he wrote with pride in A Summary View of the Rights of British America. “For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold.” Thus they were “entitled to govern those lands and themselves.”

And, notwithstanding the claims of the multicultural noise machine, the Declaration was as mono-cultural as its author.

Let us, then, toast Thomas Jefferson—and the Anglo-Saxon tradition that sired and inspired him.

©2019 ILANA MERCER
Originally: “A July Fourth Toast To Thomas Jefferson—And The Declaration,” by Ilana Mercer, July 4, 2019

‘The Magus’ By John Fowles: A Sublime Work of Art

Aesthetics, Art, English, History, Literature, The West, War

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It is remarkable how many individuals who cannot write, much less conjugate the verb to “spit” (past tense “spat,” in proper English), have attempted to review John Fowles’s The Magus.

Nick Dybek—Dybbuk, the possessed, is a better name for him—for example. No idea who he is but his grubby English alone disqualifies him from even glancing at this work.

I tried to grapple with The Magus (published in 1965, rev. ed. 1977) when barely into my twenties. I had just left Israel having returned to South Africa, so my command of English was not up to the task. I struggled.

The prosaic mind will not possess the necessary imagination and love of beauty for a book that brilliantly plays with your mind, but takes you through exhilarating labyrinths of art, history, the follies of mysticism and psychiatry, other mid-century fads of Europe and England; a lost natural world where the Greek Islands were pristine not yet swamped with smelly tourists; to metaphysics, political philosophy and the phoniness of dying for the state, for a peddled patriotism, not to mention the best description EVER of the killing fields and suicidal battle technique and posture practiced in World War One:

“…the whole butcher’s shop of war”. And, “I saw only Thanatos.” “A desert of the dead.”

Stunning writing (which only writers who craft sentences could appreciate).

I feel good for I have used “Thanatos” in my book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot, as the most apt concept to describe the drive of the white man who gives up his birthright. But I can understand the trouble an idiot reviewer would have, for most would be unfamiliar with the term and its provenance.

The Magus achieves the purpose of great literature:

If you can’t put down a work of over 600 pages—a novel has achieved its purpose. Of course, the English is exquisite and the author ever-so old Oxbridge educated. Not pretentious; just truly educated as once provided by a traditional, classical liberal arts education in the English Ivy League.

I think people who are pedantic and reductive in their oppositional inability to assimilate art and beauty will see all kinds of “isms” in this book: ” “leftism,” “postmodernism”. I disagree with such a miserable and immiserating approach to art.

Literature is either good or bad. It either takes you on a scintillating trip or mires you in dour tedium. The postmodernism tag, moreover, seems to be used as a cudgel by those who inhabit the American English department, or are of its mindset, where postmodernism was perfected—the kind of reader who has never read gorgeous English prose, and wishes to appear sophisticated by raping the literature with artificial constructs.

National Review pegged this old work correctly, as thoroughly traditional in its sweeping style.

For heaven’s sake: John Fowles was an English gentleman born in 1926. He described the mid-twentieth-century as “androgynous”! If our author toyed with the idea that the sexes had merged then; imagine his thinking had he lived today. Nuance, folks, not labels.

I’m only on page 247 and may well regret my enthusiasm. But, for now, I second the august dust-jacket reviewers on my copy, from National Review to the Charlotte Observer, to that of New York Review of Books, whose verdict was:

* “One of the most ambitious novels of the decade….”
* “Brilliant and colossal….Impossible to stop reading.”
* “A marvel. John Fowles is a master of literary magic…”
* “The book is genius throughout and often beautifully written….”
* Mr. Fowles has accomplished an imaginative tour de force, comparable to the more exciting work of Nabokov, brilliant, elegant, inventive, profound without solemnity… It is an extraordinary novel…”
* “…Fowles writes his way beautifully through the demands of text which calls for every kind of descriptive passage.”

These are observations that could not be made today. The last is particularly smart, for the storyline and the breadth of the thing–The Magus–are formidable. The text—this grand superstructure—demands the bone and blood of the author, which it gets.

Harry Crews’ ‘Wildly Precise And Violent’ Excellence

Culture, English, Literature, Pop-Culture, Relatives, The South

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What any good reader and writer will notice first about Harry Crews is his style, his English. Not a bit of the Yankee taint to it—that hackneyed idiom that predominates in our country ~ilana

Having stumbled on Harry Crews’ books recently, I think of him as perhaps our greatest novelist, story-teller, and stylist, who writes exquisite English; a disturbing genius, but that is what good literature does. It disturbs, rivets, inspires, wows, and above all, it avoids the cardinal sin of boring.

Good writing is, moreover, wicked hard. Yes, the gifted few are born with The Gift. But the truths that jump out at me from this interview are these:

Gift or not, you have nothing unless you hone it, practice, know how bad you are and watch the best like a hawk. A really good writer knows exactly what is remarkable.

The other thing Crews, an ungainly man, says which is immutable truth is that the champion is in competition with the self. I can’t count the times a pompous older (always white) male wrote to put the Little Woman down for her English (“$5 dollar words”) something that, I venture, would never have been suggested to a male writer. My reply, of course, was:

“First, fuck off. Next, just to be safe, stay away from the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, too.”

I can recommend “A Childhood: A Biography of a Place” (1978) and “The Gospel Singer.”

Just the title of the first!!!! Obviously: There is no home without a place, without kin. That’s Harry Crews. Straight to the truth.

What any good reader and writer will notice first about Crews is his style, his English. It’s what struck me. Not a bit of the Yankee taint to it—that hackneyed vernacular and idiom that predominate in the country. Nothing but exquisite English, idiosyncratically used.

Tennessee writer Kevin Wilson, professor at Sewanee, wrote the introduction for “The Gospel Singer.” He has similarly observed the following about Harry Crews’ style:

The novel is “horrific,” … — and yet “the sentences at times are just unbelievably beautiful.” Building on this contrast, Wilson debunks any rumor of sentimentality in the work: “Crews doesn’t have nuance regarding race or gender or religion or really anything, but the one place he is nuanced is his language.” By being “wildly precise and violent…”

The best of fiction is similarly unencumbered and thus endowed. “Wildly precise and violent” with one’s language is the way to be. If you can.