I. Where we are
After the start of 2020, the Covidians in Australia, America, Canada, and elsewhere in the Anglosphere crushed all politics; they plunged us into what Carl Schmitt called the age of 'depoliticisation and neutralisation'. Many of the Far Right comrades in my circle gave up on politics in that dark period - the darkest in Australian history - and few of them show a willingness to take it up again. Perhaps this spread of apathy is a natural phenomenon, one that accompanies growing old and the passage of time, but I think of it as being symptomatic of underlying realities.
The 2020s differs politically from the 2010s as the 1920s did from the 1910s. The Zeitgeist has changed, and the change has made itself felt in America as well as Australia, and in fact, signs of it first manifested themselves in America. The change is a deterioration, a rot, and America has been infected by it; America has come down with nihilism, and this is a malady that America has exported around the world. Australia would never have taken up Covidianism - lockdowns, shutdowns, compulsory masking, mandates - if America had not done it first; likewise, Australia took up obesity, 'trans rights', 'woke' activism, cancel culture, critical race theory, racial animosity to white people, following America's example.
The media, on the Left or Right, customarily exaggerates the evils of the world and always seeks to make things seem worse than they are. But even taking that fact into consideration, if we are to judge by news reports, life in America has become unlivable. For a few years now, I have every morning read through a selection of conservative and white nationalist American news sites; on these the pundits deliver nothing but bad news, so much so I have come to call this daily serving the 'bad news bulletin'. A sort of defeatism pervades the American Right, whether it be Center Right or Far Right (the lines between the two are becoming increasingly blurred), and if we are to ask the pundits if a political solution exists to the American problem, the answer more often than not is: no. Their directive is that one must eschew participation in politics and concentrate one's attention on the task of improving one's own lot in life.
The theme of individual self-fulfillment recurs constantly in the American political (or perhaps anti-political) tradition; Americans understand racial unity - on this subject they are expert - but not national, certainly not political. Americans on the Far Right especially tend to spurn politics and cut themselves off from the mainstream of American society. This is why the American Far Right, over the course of the past forty or fifty years, has stood apart from America. In this tendency one can detect not only aloofness but a sort of puritanism. The Far Right rejects American life and the small pleasures and enjoyments that can be found in American life. Light and dark shades appear in every decade of American history, and in American Far Right discourse, usually the light receives little in the way of emphasis.
A cheerfulness, confidence in the future, glamour, beauty, pervaded 1980s American pop culture - we see it in TV shows that became wildly successful in that time (e.g. Miami Vice and Bold and the Beautiful) - and contemporaneous American white nationalists such as William Pierce did not like it one bit. To take another example: the lifestyle of the characters in Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1985) seduces and entices - this is the point Stone was trying to make - and the William Pierces and Harold Covingtons rejected it. After repeated exposure to the writings of such men, we begin to suspect that they dislike the world view of Wall Street, Bold and the Beautiful, Santa Barbara, etc., because it is insufficiently bleak and myopic. Perhaps they would have approved more a popular culture and a Zeitgeist in which darkness overcame light. It is true that a dark undertone did exist in the 1980s: the popular culture of the decade reveals a fear, bordering on a pathological obsession, of nuclear war between America and the Soviet Union, between West and East. But while this dark strain marred the eighties, it did not spoil it. In the decade following, darkness became more prevalent in pop culture - see the rise to eminence of goth and grunge - but overall, the tone of the 1990s, the decade of the 'End of History', was self-satisfied and complacent, free of guilt and self-reproach. The dark side, what Freud called the 'Id' and Jung the 'Shadow', reared its ugly head only in the form of the strange, fringe groups of which Pierce's National Alliance was one; these groups espoused radicalism, apocalyptism, and millenarianism. Considering the matter further, we can conjecture that perhaps the embrace of the millenarian worldview attests to a religiosity in the American soul. America enjoyed a period of economic prosperity in the 1990s, especially towards the end, but free-thinking Americans came to the conclusion that Man does not live by bread alone; and so they turned their backs on the world and thereby placed their worldview squarely in the tradition of Manichean and fringe religious tendencies. Continuing our joruney, and skipping over the following two decades, we come to the 2020s. In this decade so far, there is all dark, no light; and that suits many on the American Far Right just fine. Finally the Far Right is finding itself in tune with the Zeitgeist.
In this essay I will be looking at America, and America's domestic policy only; I will not be looking at America's foreign relations with, say, Europe, Russia, China, nor with the history of those relations; further, I will not be discussing America's participation in the war - any war, that is, WWI, WWII, the present Russo-Ukrainian War... My reason is as follows: all three of these wars involve Russia, and the Russian question these days is so powerful that it predominates in any essay and has a way of taking over the discussion. Here I do not want attention diverted away from America. Furthermore, as Roman Skaskiw notes, the American New Left - and now today much of the American dissident Right (see Unz.Org) - subscribes to two theses, the first of which that America never brings forth any good, and the second, that America is responsible for all the evil in the world. Like Skaskiw, I dispute both. The question I am tackling here is, 'Can an American drop out of Far Right politics and still enjoy the good life in America?', and Aristotle's Good Life stands out of reach in the hellish America that New Left propaganda depicts.
As to why one should drop out of the movement, the answer is that since the start of the decade, the movement has demonstrated its ineffectuality, powerlessness, and weakness; for one, it was crushed by the Covidian juggernaut. In addition, the latest Russo-Ukrainian War (really a re-run of the failed Ukrainian war of independence of 1917 to 1921) has split the movement. No better evidence of that split can be found than in 4Chan/Pol; two competing sub-forums now exist, one anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian, the other pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian. Given all this, one is compelled to ask if one needs the movement and if one can find a use for it.
II. The coup that dare not speak its name
The American malaise extends beyond politics but owes part of its origin to politics, and the facts of American politics today are as follows. In 2020, for the first time in American history, a president was ousted in a coup. It was masterminded by Big Tech, Hollywood, the American Deep State, and the radical Left, all of them working in concert with the Democratic Party.
Almost overnight, North American politics became Latin American. A comparison must be made between Trump and Peron, a populist with deep support from the Argentinian working-class - the so-called 'demiscados' (shirtless ones), who were the equivalent of Trump's deplorables. Peron, who was condemned by America at the time as a 'dictator' (despite his winning two elections in a row), was ousted in a 1955 coup and forced to flee the country.
Similarly, we can draw a comparison between Trump and the populist Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. When one assumes the mantle of the populist, one becomes loved by the people and one earns the wrath of the anti-people - the establishment; in populist political scenarios, 'the people' and 'the establishment' act in accordance with their roles, roles that seem almost pre-arranged, and they follow a set script. Predictably, Thaksin was ousted in a military coup in 2006. In exile, he plotted to regain power for his party and he organised for his sister Yingluck Shinawatra to run for prime minister in the elections of 2011. This saw another landslide victory for Thaksin's party, but Yingluck was ousted in the coup of 2014 and forced, like Thaksin, to leave the country. Thai courts tried both in absentia for 'crimes' and found both guilty.
Thaksin and his party remain popular, and now the question on everyone's lips is whether or not, after the current election, in which Thaksin's daughter Paetongtarn won big, the Royal Thai Army (RTA) will launch another coup.
How the military might respond is a salient question. The RTA’s interventions over the past 15 years have been aimed at averting the return of the fugitive former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who became resoundingly popular after his election in 2001. Viewed as a threat to the country’s traditional royal establishment, Thaksin was removed from power in a coup in 2006, but the old guard has never quite succeeded in scrubbing away his influence.
After 2006, as Thaksin-aligned parties won repeated elections, the establishment used a variety of underhand legal means, some straying into the absurd, to remove his proxies from office. Eventually, it lost patience and launched another coup in 2014 to remove his sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, from power.
Despite all of these efforts, however, the Pheu Thai Party remains the largest party in the Thai parliament, and the five years of direct military dictatorship that followed the 2014 coup helped radicalize a younger generation of political activists that have taken aim not just at the military’s outsized role in Thai politics, but the monarchical power that stands behind it. True to type, after the youth-focused Future Forward Party scored significant gains in the 2019 election, a court banned it on a technicality. Its successor, the Move Forward Party, is now poised to run in the 2023 election.
In this context, it is therefore perfectly reasonable for journalists to ask how military commanders would react to the return of opposition forces at next year’s election. Whether their answers tell us anything of substance is another question. Indeed, the RTA’s history of interventions in Thai politics ensures that the promises of its commanders are pretty much the opposite of reassuring.
Unlike Peron and Thaksin, Trump has not been forced to flee, but the Mar A Lago raid portends that he might. And Trump may like Thaksin be put on trial for 'crimes'. Already, an unconstitutional impeachment trial in the Senate has been held.
Up until the end of 2022, it was an open question as to if Trump and the Republicans would be allowed back into power. After the mid-terms, we can answer in the negative. The expertly rigged mid-terms of 2022 show that the Biden junta is not prepared to relinquish power; nor will it make even the slightest concession to Trump's party.
After the events of 2020 and 2022, America at stands at a crossroads; this is one of the most significant periods in American history, perhaps the most significant since the American Civil War; the Democrats are now, in the words of Rush Limbaugh, in the business of 'abolishing elections'. Surely, then, the American dissident Right should take an interest in American politics? Perhaps it should fight the Democrats and the Left with a view to defeating them? But no: the American Far Right is thoroughly demoralised. See, for example, the slew of articles at Counter-Currents after the mid-terms; these seemed to welcome the American decline or at least acquiesce to it, and blame the Republican 'loss' not on the Left but the Right: 'A Faint Redward Dribble'; 'Why White Nationalists Don't Want a Red Wave'; 'The GOP Deserved to Lose, but Now What?'; 'The Red Ripple Was a Triumph for White Advocates'; 'A Depressing Election' (the title of this Kevin McDonald article has a picture of McDonald's melancholy visage underneath). In contrast, it is conservatives - many of them elderly - who showed fighting spirit, masculine vigour, and a willingness to call a spade a spade. 'Democrats are trying to steal our election, again'; 'America owes Donald Trump a 2nd term to finish the job'; 'Gaslighted: It's clear Democrats just stole another election'. The irony is that twenty years ago, white nationalists relentlessly attacked the boomer Ziocon Joseph Farah, chiding him for his pusillanimity; now the shoe is on the other foot.
It has become clear that the American Far Right repudiates politics; it has become (in Carl Schmitt's sense) apolitical, it no longer wants to make The Decision, if it ever did. Perhaps if we were to travel back in time to a hundred and sixty years ago, we would find, during the outbreak of the American Civil War, discontented and misanthropic intellectuals who insisted that both sides (the Union and Confederacy) were qualitatively the same - perhaps both were controlled by the Jews or Masons or Illuminati or whoever; ergo, neither represented the true interests of the white man; ergo, these intellectuals were not obliged to choose between Jefferson and Lincoln.
The American Far Right - and much of the Center Right - has abandoned the political; it fights on the field of culture. What can we say about that culture in the present decade? That it has been infected by a nihilism, as has been stated before; so what can be done to alleviate it? Would the re-election of Trump help? Another Trump term would see an improvement in American life, and on this I agree with the pro-Trump conservatives; but after performance of the Republicans in the mid-terms, a Democratic victory in 2024 seems likely, as does the margin of that victory exceeding that of 2020. In the last presidential election, Biden won 81 million votes, more votes than any presidential candidate in history. We can surmise that were the brain-damaged and cognitively challenged Fetterman, who 'won' the Senatorial race in Pennsylvania, to run for the Presidency in 2024, he would 'win' with not 81 but somewhere in the region of a 100 million votes.
Trump would be blamed for the loss, even if were not on the ticket (and he was not on the ticket in 2022 mid-terms); but it matters not if Trump were dead or exiled to Mars. The Republican candidate, whoever he may be, is being set up to lose.
One prognostication is that the Democratic Party stands to stay in power for the remainder of the century, and this in part because the American Right has ceded all the ground to the American Left. A dark future looms ahead, one that many Americans, paradoxically enough, seem to relish. In the not-so-distant past, Americans exhibited many admirable personality traits, and one of them being an attitude - a 'can-do' attitude. This American optimism and determination achieved many extraordinary feats, and Trump belongs to that older generation of Americans who lived that ethos; these Americans would look at a problem and declare at once that it could be solved with a little American ingenuity. But for all his troubles, Trump is almost universally reviled on the American Right, especially by the many white nationalists and mainstream conservatives who seem to take a perverse pleasure in America's decline.
III. The way of the 'normie'
Given these gloomy predictions, it would make sense for the American individual concerned with his own self-preservation to get out of politics, altogether. And who knows, perhaps he could find inner freedom and satisfaction as a 'normie'. Dropping out of politics, he could become an average apolitical citizen.
That would seem a wise course of action on the assumption the 'normie' perspective is the most wise, at least more wise than that of the dissident Rightist. This thesis has been propounded relentlessly by the liberals and the antifascists over the course of the past thirty years. The enemies of the Far Right will accuse anyone who takes up nationalist, racialist, anti-Semitic ideas, and even anyone who counsels even a mild immigration restrictionism, of cutting himself from good, normal, decent, human society. By adopting Far Right beliefs, he makes himself irrational, and he stands at risk of destroying himself and others.
When first encountered, the thesis is appealing, especially to the Far Right activist who feels burned out after many years of fruitless service in the movement. Apparently it seems confirmed by his everyday experience. But now, three years after 2020 and the onset of Covidianism, the thesis has been blown of the water. The 'normies', so commonsensical, so full of everyday salt of the earth wisdom, so moderate, so sane - have all revealed themselves to be the cranks, the crazy ones, the freaks.
Covidianism originated in communist China. The Chinese communists were the first to introduce cultism into modern politics, and to devise techniques of 'thought reform' or 'washing of the brain' (brainwashing). Following the Chinese example, the Australian political establishment (which includes doctors, politicians, journalists, police) turned cities such as Melbourne and Sydney into vast POW camps; and the residents were treated much like the American POWs in Chinese prison camps during the Korean War. Cults seek to remold a person, and one of the means of doing this is to make the abnormal normal. Behaviour that from any rational point of view which seems insane - behaviour such as wearing a filthy bacteria-ridden mask over one's face most hours of the day in the name of 'health' and 'avoiding infection' - becomes the dominant norm. It is the person outside the cult, the non-devotee, who is framed as the abnormal and crazy one, and peer-pressure and shaming, among other tried and true cult techniques, are used to bring him to heel. The member of the Scientologists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Moonies, etc., believes he is rational and in full possession of his faculties; it is you, the non-believer, who is hiding from the truth, and it is you who is the deviate.
Cultism cannot be maintained for long, however. Those who allowed themselves to be swayed by the Covidians, those who complied with the social distancing, the forced masking, the contact tracing, the endless and self-defeating Covid tests, the 'checking in' to visit a grocery store, the placing oneself under house arrest, the 'working remotely' (because offices were so 'unsafe'), the internment in concentration camps of people who 'tested positive', the mandates, and the persecution of the 'unvaccinated'; all of them were warring against nature. And this was a war they could not win.
One has to ask why it is that they started the war in the first place. The answer is that the 'normie' is not so wise and moderate as first assumed. Covidianism revealed the darkness, irrationality, and self-destructiveness in his soul.
Such knowledge breeds contempt. Before 2020, I believed that the 'normie', at least when he was gathered in a mass, possessed some form of nous, self-directedness, motive power. I also believed that if he was sufficiently angered and outraged, particularly by the exposure of a truth that had been hidden from him, he would revolt. But I was mistaken. Supposing that, in a surprising volte-face, the establishment admitted that it had sought to deliberately poison millions of people by foisting the clot shots upon them: what would the reaction of the 'normie' be? Would he revolt, assemble a pitchfork mob, descend upon Fauci and Gates, and lynch them? I do not think so: the 'normie' would probably yawn, shrug his shoulders, and go about his business. Like Nietzsche's Last Man, he would blink.
III. In search of well-being
For the first three years of the 2020s, the West was obsessed by health. It put absolute security, absolute safety (from infection with Covid) before all else; this disproportionate concern made people unbalanced. One could not share a bus or train carriage, or walk into an office, for fear of being infected by others; one could not go out one's business without a wearing a mask and standing three feet away from others at all times. And the irony is that millions endangered their health in the pursuit of health.
A preoccupation with safety and self-preservation and an aversion to risk and danger is associated with the feminine, and one detect in Covidianism, and all cults, the womanly. And women hanker after security more than anything else. Many observers ask why it is that an indoctrinated member of a cult cannot simply walk out the door of the cult compound; why it is that he cannot extricate himself from the cult's grip. The answer is that in him a need for absolute security has been inculcated; the world outside the cult has been made to seem a dangerous place and freedom, threatening.
This is not to say that one should not value one's health. Many of the refuseniks who turned down the 'vaccine' did so because they wanted to preserve their health; they sought to avoid any of the sickness and even fatality associated with the 'vaccine'. This concern outweighed the admission to a bar or restaurant, the diminution of one's social status, the retention of one's job.
Health, well-being, the body, athleticism, vitality, aestheticism - all these are linked. One asks why it is that so many cities in America, Australia, and elsewhere in the Anglosphere, are so ugly; why the lives lived in them are so sub-optimal. The Great Replacement, of course, bears responsibility for bringing this state of affairs about, as does the architectural design of our cities - the American economist Nathan Lewis has made a convincing argument that cities are designed for cars and not for us. As for the inhabitants of these cities, well, today they tend more often than not to look unhealthy and unhappy. The reason for that (and it is one overlooked by nationalist and racialist polemicists) is simple: diet. Western man has, for the past seventy years or so, been overdosing on protein, fats, cholesterol, food acid (of the sort found in animals), and sulfur (also found in great quantities in mostly animals and animal products such as eggs). The carnivore can consume, digest, and excrete this offal with ease, and metabolise it, that is, turn it into energy, and do it all without harming itself; but Man, not being a carnivore, cannot. Because of the food he eats, Western man is afflicted by a number of ailments which could easily be avoided: heart disease, diabetes, atherosclerosis, strokes, cancer.
Something we notice most of all these days is obesity. Western man is more overweight than ever; one is shocked, when one looks at photographs of Australians and Americans forty to fifty years ago, to see how slender they once were.
The subject of what a man eats does not fit into an essay on politics; or so one would think. Oswald Spengler disagrees. In Spengler's Decline-, we are told that the philosophy of a Culture, along with its politics, art, mathematics, undergoes changes as it nears the end of a Culture's life. One symptom of change is that the philosophers who built grandiose systems - philosophers such as Kant and Hegel - pass out of fashion. The thinkers who succeed such men in the Culture's progression now educate, instruct, legislate; they teach men how to live their lives. The Culture enters the age of what Spengler calls 'unmathematical philosophy'. In the Western Culture the men who dominate this epoch are Nietzsche, Wagner, Schopenhauer, Ibsen. The 'unmathematical' intellectuals contemplate matters that were once regarded as mundane, and one of these is the question of correct diet.
The Western (or Faustian) Culture has moved past the age of unmathematical philosophy, the high point of the philosophy having been reached around 150 years ago; we have now entered an epoch of 'Degradation of abstract thinking into professional lecture-room philosophy' and 'Compendium literature'. The history of the second half of the 20th century shows this to be true. In the end, the university reclaimed Sartre and Heidegger, the last two of the unmathematical philosophers, and made them safe, and as Colin Wilson notes, by the end of the century, Nietzsche - hitherto the most dangerous of modern philosophers - had become as respectable as Kant or Hegel. Even so, the episode of unmathematical philosophy, brief as it was, does give me a precedent for the explorations of apparently trivial questions of living.
If one takes the apolitical path and devotes oneself to the pursuit of freedom and self-actualisation, one usually immerses oneself in works of religion, philosophy, self-help, mysticism, New Age. Great as these are, they draw an incomplete picture, and they give an incomplete guide to living. One may follow the wisdom contained in the works of these schools of thought, one may gain great insight into the riddles of the universe, one may arrive at The Truth; but none of it will do any good if one is overweight, if one is suffering from a multitude of ailments, if one's body is breaking down. A physical deterioration leads to a mental and emotional. Any survey will reveal that most people who fall prey to vice eat am unsatisfactory diet, and the primary reason why they indulge in alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, is because their bodies are being deprived of vital nutrients.
How then does one assure oneself of a sound body and thereby a sound mind? For European man, the answer is to return to what has been his traditional diet of the past four hundred years, and that is: potatoes and bread. A vegan diet - or as I prefer to call it, plant-based diet (something that sounds much less frightening) - constitutes the reverse of the 'keto' diet: a diet of potatoes, rice, lentils, split peas, corn, chickpeas, etc., is characterised by high levels of fiber and carbohydrate and low levels of fat and protein. If European man were to adopt the diet, he would return to form and eat what he has normally eaten for the past few hundred years. He would stop gorging himself on animals and animal products, which were once regarded as rarities and luxuries. And as a result, his health problems would be solved.
Veganism alone will not cure all man's ills, however. One can be vegan and unhealthy; earlier this year I saw in an Australian country town a grossly overweight young woman wearing a t-shirt that read 'Happy fat vegan'. Soy products combined with fake meat and dairy (usually both of these these are composed of soy) most likely caused her condition, as did no doubt copious quantities of the liquid fat that is vegetable oil, something that seems to be in everything these days, even bread.
IV. In search of the past
So far we have been concerned with Aristotle's notion of the Good Life. Is such a life still possible in America today? Was there a time in recent American history when people lived and lived well?
During the lockdowns and riots of 2020, a poster on Counter-Currents remarked that his friends and relatives were retreating into the past to escape the present. They would seek entertainment - and reassurance - by watching episodes of old American TV shows such as Dawson's Creek and The X-Files. I understood this impulse of theirs, for in that year and the next two, I pulled off my own escape into the pop culture past; while working from home, I let hundreds of hours of a sixty-year-old American daytime TV soap play in the background. To keep up with the action, I would look up now from my desk and see what was happening on the TV screen; this is how one is meant to watch daytime TV soaps - not with one's full attention. (One could call it not overhearing, but over-watching).
The show became one of my favourites. I was particularly taken with the episodes of the 2000s; these had been put together by someone with an artist's eye. The soft and muted colours of the bedspreads, lampshades, wall paintings, stained wooden panels, were carefully coordinated. The sense of style impressed. The men's clothes pleased the eye; men's blazers, jeans, leather jackets, t-shirts, were of a cut that flattered the male figure irrespective of the wearer's age and size. The women's clothes registered, too, with the exception of one item fashionable at the time, this being a Lindsay Lohan-style blouse that looked like a cross between a chemisole and a maternity dress. In general, the characters looked good and lived well; they led better lives than I and millions of others did in 2020. One may object that this is TV and therefore it is a fantasy that bears no resemblance to real life, but I disagree; I myself owned and wore the same jackets, shirts, jumpers that the actors wore; unfortunately, these clothes grew old and tatty, as they always do, and I threw them out. So I see this TV show as being true to life. And watching it twenty years after, it seemed like a dream life. In particular, I was touched by one scene where two male friends, wearing svelte jeans and jackets, were enjoying a beer together in a bar that had techno music thumping in the background (the 2000s gave rise to good dance music); this was a pleasure forbidden to me and millions of others, because in 2020 bars and restaurants were closed down, and then reopened - but only for the 'vaccinated'.
Am I making out that the 2000s was a golden era? Certainly, it was not - not politically, anyway - but Americans, to judge by the TV shows and commercials of the time, seemed to live Aristotle's Good Life. Now they live in a Pajama Nation. The decade following the 2000s seems cheap and impoverished in comparison, something that can be attributed to the adverse economic circumstances following the 2008 financial collapse. But one cannot blame the markets entirely: fashion, culture, and aesthetics in the 2010s did not improve even after the brief economic revival under Trump. In the 2010s, it was as though Americans made the choice to live sub-par lives. It is no coincidence that in the 2010s all the daytime TV soaps in America were either canceled or deprived of the lavish funding that they had enjoyed in the decades prior. One can argue that these were sound business decisions - the popularity of print media and free to air TV was fading at the time - but all the same, Americans could have afforded to bolster these confections and bagatelles, which received far more by way of investment in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the American economy had hit rock bottom (and when, paradoxically enough, Americans had been more cheerful).
In the 2010s, one sees the ghost of a more prosperous past in Lifetime and Hallmark movies. The Hallmark and Lifetime channels churn out by the dozen what were once called 'women's pictures' that go straight to TV. Clearly, an audience - a female American audience - exists for these (but not, apparently, for daytime TV soaps anymore). These productions are usually set in middle America, and watching them brings to mind the America of twenty to thirty years ago. The men and women characters (usually played by former soap actors) are predominately white and always look clean, healthy, and well-groomed; the leading men are often handsome, the leading women beautiful; the homes they live in look clean and prosperous (for one, the kitchen surfaces always gleam). Evidently the makers of these shows are portraying how decent working-class and middle-class Americans live - or want to live.
This ideal, which is perhaps only a fantasy, appears elsewhere in the Anglosphere. During the lockdown years, thousands of Australians who lived in Sydney and Melbourne sought to emigrate to rural and regional Australia, and as a result, house prices in those areas shot up to record highs. It is reasonable to assume that these Australians were leaving the city for the country to regain a lost purity and innocence; and perhaps they too wanted to live like Americans in a Hallmark or Lifetime movie.
Perhaps they were chasing a dream. America manufactures dreams and exports them all over the globe. Baudrillard explores the American world of myth and fantasy in his Amerique (1986), a chronicle of his road trip in the early eighties through America. This is his most readable work, and one feels the urge, after reading it, to hit the road and drive through American desert highways and drink whiskey in motels. It could be that after such a tour one will come away disappointed - in the words of the movie poster for Easy Rider (1969), 'A man went looking for America... And couldn't find it anywhere'. But illusion matters more than reality, at least to Baudrillard.
Truth does come into it as well; the reason why the soap opera subculture attracted a huge following is that the daytime TV soap genre reflects life. The soap is concerned with the feminine and the maternal; the heroine undertakes a journey through life marked by stops along the way, and these stops are romance, sex, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, child-rearing. If the character is popular enough, she be the bride at an extravagant wedding (a soap staple) and wear a beautiful wedding dress. The female characters are always shown to be enjoying these events, and why not: they get to wear exquisite clothes. To judge by these weddings, American women's formal wear is eye-catching, even ostentatious, and men's is sombre, muted; men's clothes are always black or gray. Indeed, only in the 2000s could men in the West display plumage: the splendid colours and patterns on the men's shirts of the time gave a man a means of expressing his aesthetic sensibilities.
The soap subculture is feminine, to be sure, and watching soaps, I learned a great many new things about women; for the first time I heard about Lamaze exercises and something called 'spotting'. My friends ask why it is that I like the genre; my answer is that one cannot subsist entirely on manly fare - war movies and war documentaries, for example - and that one needs a balanced diet. And in addition, the soap genre, twenty years ago, showed us some of the best sides of American life.
V. NEETs and a conclusion
Today many Americans do not need to be enjoined to an escape from the past. They are already doing it. Something that I have noticed over the years is that the bookish American men who are students of military history are interested - one could even say obsessed - by the subject of the American Civil War. And if you draw them into a discussion, you will see them exhibit an amazing erudition. Why the interest? Because the story of the American Civil War, and the events leading up to it, and the aftermath of the War, is a story that is American. And I will leave it at that; there is no need to speak here of 'implicit whiteness' and the like.
An American could spend a lifetime studying this period of American history and beyond, and profit greatly as a result. He could delve further - into the history of Europe and the white race - and rely upon even mainstream and respectable authors for this task, as the authors at least until fifty years ago are by the standards of today quite conservative. Through his researches, the American will learn the salutary fact that American history did not begin with WWII and the 'Civil Rights Struggle'; and that American history is refreshingly free of political correctness and 'pozzedness', at least before the mid-20th century, which represents a change of course.
Research into philosophy, religion, New Age, self-help, will likewise broaden his horizons and develop his spirit. But (and here is the point of this article) any quest for spiritual self-fulfilment, for self-actualisation, is doomed to fail if one is physically unwell. Feelings of fatigue, and of being old, sick, worn-out, and of being pessimistic towards one's prospects - all these indicate that the body is not functioning at the peak of its capacity. Most of us ought to start the day feeling clear-headed and strong, but many of us do not. That can be attributed, much of the time, to vice. Lassitude, irritation, headaches, fatigue, can come from over-indulgence from the night before; perhaps one has embarked on a Mad Men-style debauch and smoked a great many cigarettes and drank a great deal of alcohol; perhaps one has wasted precious night time hours by staying up late and browsing online pornography; and to cap it off, perhaps one, in order to boost one's energies the following morning, drinks the first coffee of the day - certainly this blast of caffeine revives, but afterwards, it enervates. Vice is always to be enjoyed now and paid for later.
The vices mentioned above are harmless in comparison with the vices that are sweeping America today - e.g., the consumption of Fentanyl - but they take their toll on one's mental and physical soundness all the same. Americans understand the dangers of vice - after all, they did ban the drinking of alcohol for ten years, and America is the only Western nation (to my knowledge) to have done so - as did the Covidians; this is why during the lockdown years the Covidians encouraged people to indulge themselves and their weaknesses as much as possible.
But all the clean living and exercise in the world will fail to produce the desired outcomes - health, strength, a confident attitude towards one's life and future - if one indulges in the wrong food; e.g. if one eats a greasy pizza for lunch, steak and fries for dinner, eggs and bacon for breakfast. Even food devoid of any trace of animal products can do harm: what if one's preferred meals are vegan pizza and soy steak? Teetotalism alone does not guarantee perfect health.
If the right food is consumed, one over time enters a state of well-being and serenity. The digestive system, for instance, will improve. It will begin to function normally, and one's body begins to run like a smooth, well-oiled machine. Cybernetics then ensures a steady flow of positive feedback to the brain. One gets high, high on life.
This puts one in condition, in form. By training the body, one is training the mind, and so an American who wishes to embark on a spiritual emigration from America is prepared for his journey. As to where he goes - it could be into the past, or into the worlds of Eastern religion, New Age, German philosophy.
In 2016, Dr Nicholas Eberstadt published Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis. In a recent interview, he describes in detail the phenomenon of men who have dropped out of the workforce and who are now doing absolutely nothing.
I think over on the other side of the ocean, they call it NEET, N-E-E-T, neither employed or in education or training. If we look at that group, which is not a small group, well over 6 million, they basically don’t do civil society. Almost no time invested in either worship, or volunteering, or charity work. Although you might think they have practically nothing but time on their hands, they do surprisingly little help around the house with other people, other family members, or with housework, a lot less than employed women with kids, who are more or less the most time-scarce, time-poor people in America. They don’t even get out of the house that much. They’re getting out of the house less and less according to their self-reporting. What they do is they spent a lot of time in front of screens. Now, these clunky surveys won’t tell us what they’re watching or what sorts of devices they’re watching, but they’re reporting, spending about 2000 hours a year in front of screens. Now, for many people, that’s like a full-time job. And when we bear in mind that other reports indicate that about half of these men say that they’re taking pain medication every day... I mean, not necessarily prescription or illicit, over-the-counter, maybe in some cases, but half of them are taking pain medication every day. We’ve got this vision not just of people spending all day playing World of Warcraft or Call of Duty. They’re doing it stoned, and it’s a kind of picture of life in limbo in purgatory. It’s miserable, and certainly, these are not the sorts of skills that are going to get you back into the workforce. They’re going to make you much more likely A, a long-termer, and B, possibly a candidate for deaths of despair.
In another interview, Eberstadt explains:
We’re not supposed to talk in value terms, at least in many parts of polite society these days, but it is apparent, it is manifestly apparent, it’s screaming out at us, the evidence of our senses, that people who are not connected to work or to their families or to their faiths or to their communities are not engaged in leisure. They’re not boning up on their Schopenhauer. As I say, they’re, in so many case, in trainer courses for deaths of despair. We’ve had this simultaneous explosion of wealth and explosion of misery in our society that can’t be explained unless we take a look at morals, values, and personal ethos.
I will not here evaluate Eberstadt's thinking, but I will say this: by all means, the drop-out men described above ought to be studying Schopenhauer. We Generation Xers and Millenial do not have much time left and so we must use it wisely. A study of Schopenhauer - or the American Civil War, or anything from the 19th century for that matter - takes us away from the ugly, vulgar, self-destructive world that is the 2020s.
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