Oh, Oh Antonio Gramsci

 

John Waters talking to James Collins

A masterly summary by John Waters of how Marxism evolved from being about class war and economics into Cultural Marxism which focused on the infiltration of institutions such as the Press and the University to promulgate their doctrines and the switch away from the proles to the other ‘oppressed’ classes such as blacks, gays, women etc and the general demonization of the white male patriarchy etc, family, etc.  The coining of the ‘long march through the institutions’ is ascribed to Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, and it was taken up by Rudi Dutschke a 68‘r as a slogan.  Wikipedia tells me that he was a guest of Conor Cruise O’Brian in Ireland and considered for a while staying here.  The Cruiser was our first public intellectual and our second Fintan O’Toole wrote his M.A. thesis on Antonio Gramsci.  Clearly a great devotee.  In a dismal screed against Enoch Burke he compared him to Genghis Khan.  The reason Finto can’t analyse the transgender thing too closely is because certain of the feminist faithful are T.E.R.F.'s and want to save the 100 yard dash for born women athletes not to mention changing rooms etc.  We must never forget that in post modernism there are no contradictions because there is no definitive truth.  To that end I am transitioning to His Excellency and my autonym is ‘whatever’ (you’re having yourself).   sláinte an bhradáin,  gob fluich ‘is bas in Eireann should it survive.

(health of the salmon, wet gob, and death in Ireland)

Mattias Desmet ('The Psychology of Totalitarianism') talks to John Waters

 

Mattias Desmet has been popping up on youtube speaking about the phenomenon of mass formation or the coalescenceof a significant percentage of the population around a perceived situation  that must be dealt with even at the cost of abandoning normal ethical principles.  The covid 19 ‘emergency’ which I have been calling covidology is an example of this zombification.  A lot of people got bitten.

In his conversation with John Waters he covers much of the same ground as he did previously linking the panicked response to the emergence of totalitarianism.  He’s written a book on this ‘The Psychology of Totalitarianism’ which is to be published later this month.  The difference between the usual delineation of the mechanisms facilitating the emergence of a mob mind and this conversation with John Waters is the sympathetic vibration of their strings which brought out what Otto called the non-rational sources of knowledge and awe normally called wisdom.  Aristotle and the Thomists, that band, call it connaturality.  The not-mentioned Jacques Maritain frequently writes about it in ‘The Degrees of Knowledge’- on my book stand at the moment.

Have a look: you’re worth it.

totalitarianism

MSM and The Free Press

 Recently if that means for the last 200 or more years there has been talk of corrupt, venal, idle mouthpieces of the powers that be usually called  journaliars. (John Waters coinage)

Certainly reading Hilaire Belloc’s book ‘The Free Press’ (pub. 1917) he was less than sanguine about the ‘fair and balanced’ media of the day.  He writes:

"Take the Marconi case. The big official papers first boycotted it for months, and then told a pack of silly lies in support of the politicians. The Free Press gave one the truth but its various organs gave the truth for very different reasons and with very different impressions. To some of the Irish papers Marconi was a comic episode, "just what one expects of Westminster"; others dreaded it for fear it should lower the value of the Irish-owned Marconi shares. "The New Age" looked at it from quite another point of view than that of the "New Witness," and the specifically Socialist Free Press pointed it out as no more than an example of what happens under Capitalist Government.

A Mahommedan paper would no doubt have called it a result of the Nazarene religion, and a Thug paper an awful example of what happens when your politicians are not Thugs.

My point is, then, that the Free Press thus starting from so many different particular standpoints has not yet produced a general organ; by which I mean that it has not produced an organ such as would command the agreement of a very great body of men, should that very great body of men be instructed on the real way in which we are governed."

Cecil Chesterton, G.K.'s brother, as editor of ‘The New Witness’ was sued by Godfrey Isaacs for criminal libel re Marconi shares and insider trading.   He was found guilty and fined £100.

Everyone has an angle and Belloc thought that in order to get a comprehensive view of the state of the land you ought to read several papers and particularly those with a narrow sectional interest.

William Cobbett 100 years before that in his weekly ‘Political Register’ got in trouble with the Whigs for his article on the flogging of British soldiers by German merceneries for the refusal to pay for the issue knapsack.  Newgate was his residence for two years plus a £1000 fine.  His decision to defend himself was unwise.  He wrote:

"Flog them; flog them; flog them! They deserve it, and a great deal more. They deserve a flogging at every meal time. 'Lash them daily, lash them duly.' What, shall the rascals dare to mutiny, and that, too, when the German Legion is so near at hand! Lash them, lash them, lash them! They deserve it. O, yes; they merit a double-tailed cat. Base dogs! What, mutiny for the sake of the price of a knapsack! Lash them! Flog them! Base rascals! Mutiny for the price of a goat's skin; and, then, upon the appearance of the German soldiers, they take a flogging as quietly as so many trunks of trees!—I do not know what sort of a place Ely is; but I really would like to know how the inhabitants looked one another in the face, while this scene was exhibiting in their town. I should like to have been able to see their faces, and to hear their observations to each other at the time. This occurrence at home will, one would hope, teach the loyal a little caution in speaking of the means which Napoleon employs (or, rather, which they say he employs), in order to get together and to discipline his conscripts…" (Political Register, 1st., July 1809).

............

In a letter he describes the meeting of his enemies in the hall of the Mother of Parliaments:

Perceval met his brother-in-law Redesdale at the portal of Westminster Hall. They shook hands and gave each other joy! Chucklehead but crafty Curtis met Tierney in the Hall. 'Ah, a, ah! We have got him at last,' said Curtis. 'Poor Cobbett! Let him be bold now!' The old place-hunter answered: 'Damn him! I hope they'll squeeze him!' They did squeeze indeed; but their claws, hard as they were, did not squeeze hard enough.

‘Chucklehead’ should be revived.  I bestow it on Leo Chucklehead Varadker.

Main stream media at present is the vassal of corporate and government interests of a liberal progressive nature but to offset their univocity they will have a columnist who writes against this tone.  In Ireland each paper has a pet troglodyte  who by the general ethos is wrong about everything.  In the Irish Times that used to be John Waters but he was constructively defenestrated and now writes on substack under the style and title - johnwaters.substack.com

A lot of members of the awkward squad have ended up on substack.  They now represent the sectional Free Press that Belloc wrote about and are a balance to the journaliesism of MSM.

John Waters, Gemma O'Doherty, and the Bermuda Triangle of the High Court

 Cases brought to the High Court in Ireland run the risk of costs for the appellants which can be substantial. In cases where the matter to be decided on is deemed to be of public interest those costs are remitted.  John Waters (cf. Give Us Back the Bad Roads

bad roads) and Gemma O’Doherty brought a case questioning the legality of emergency provisions in relation to Covid.  The Wikipedia article on John Waters high court and his career sum up the result of this action:

"On 2 March 2021, the Irish Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal by Waters and Gemma O'Doherty of the High Court’s refusal to permit them to bring their challenge, and its award of costs of that hearing against them. Counsel for the state in the appeal argued that some of the applicants' submissions were Bermuda Triangle stuff."

All accounts of this result mention the Bermuda Triangle, and there is a generic quality to the reports as though all journalists, in the safety of their homes, were working from the report of a single intrepid member of the Fourth Estate.  Costs were awarded against Waters and O’Doherty.  Estimates put it at a five figure sum which is a severe range of financial pain.

What made John  and Gemma lose their bearings and challenge the world wide consensus that this virus was so supremely dangerous extraordinary measures needed to be taken?  Only one result was possible: disappearing off the radar.

In time this covidology will come to be seen as an amplified version of the Y2K problem that was going to cause massive disruption but didn’t.  The technocratic mind cannot abide uncertainty and wants no truck with negative capability.

"I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. (John Keats)

To live with risk is to live a human life.  It was a series of mutations that brought us from the big bang to now. Let’s get on with it. In fact we are getting on with it and doing up a 70‘s bungalow that our son has bought.  New plumbing, wiring, stoves, tiling and no shortage of tradesmen to do the work since the construction sites are closed down.  Don’t tell the government.

Covidology III

Let’s all get over the idea that those who disagree with us on major issues are wrong about everything and moreover when we appear to agree they have some deep evil plan afoot. The lockdown has brought this thinking out in many usually quite sensible people. Of course the government and politicians generally are a nest of vipers that we have thrust on our collective bosom but they may have been right and the proof of it is the vastly improved readiness which will enable a staged and prudent return to normality. We are getting to that point. Patience is required. However John Waters and Gemma O’Doherty have brought a case before the High Court on the unconstitutionality of the actions taken by an interim government.
high court
We are at the stage common to P.R. systems in Europe of coalition talks after a numerically indecisive general election. Waters is a man for whom I have a great deal of respect and is not a knee jerk contrarian though the media may portray him as such. I believe he has taken a wrong turn here. O’Doherty is a anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist, yes, a flake probably.

Now that readiness has been established, as much as it ever can be, we need to focus on return to a parlous normal lest sheltering in place becomes cowering in place.

Bricolage and the Noumenal

John Waters’ daddy was a champion bricoleur or a man who could fix things by using whatever materials were to hand. John tells the story of how when he was on the road making deliveries in his van the drive shaft broke. ‘Wait a minute lads’ and off he goes into a field and comes back with a stout ash plant and a length of bull wire which he used as a splint on the shaft. With a light foot they made their way home.

Claude Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind speaks of myths assembled out of odds and ends already existing in the culture i.e. bricolage. The ancient great grandfather religions are like that. You may find anything in them. Think of the ancient oddities in the Pentateuch and the Vedas. As time goes on these elements are subtilised and turn into theology and metaphysics. The primary thing is the ecstasy and then ‘tents’ are built that try to keep that mysterium tremendum et fascinans close to hand. ( I refer to the transfiguration of Jesus.Mt 17, Lk.9)

The noumenal is one with our consciousness even when most of the time we are alienated from it. Coleridge in Biographia Litteraria writes:

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

Opposed to the Primary Imagination is the normal state of mind or the dope tropes that we inhabit:

 Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.

It is ‘fanciful’, pace Coleridge, to say that religions confound each other. “Truth is one, the wise call it by various names" said the Vedic sage. We confuse the containers with the contained but, you know, use whatever is handy.

Shop Boys rule O.K.

Now that the Xmas is over and the high point of the book buying year has passed it is safe to allow Give us Back the Bad Roads by John Waters back on the shelves of Easons and Dubrays where they were unavailable prior to Xmas. Where there were none there are now stacks.

We don’t need official censorship in Ireland, we can do it for ourselves.

censorship/censorshop

Modern Censorship/Censorshop in Ireland

In the market-place of ideas you can pass by the vendor of crepes, filthy foreign food, past the vendor of scented candles, eating the wax of which is an unrecognised cause of spontaneous combustion (flatulence near a naked flame) first noted in altar servers; the cheese stall with the smoked cannon rounds, a vile impertinence. There’s the sourdough bread. Ah yes. What though if the comptroller general of the licence issuing authority granting you space in the market were to ban your product? No more bread. No, no, no; wails of.

So it seems that this is what has happened to the Irish journalist John Waters whose new book that I reviewed recently is not being offered for sale by any of the major book retailers in Ireland.
give us back the bad roads by John Waters

Let me established a guideline for judgement here, a moral surveyors bench mark if you will. White supremacy and the conviction that abortion is a bad thing are not on the same contour. Recollect that Ireland has a population less that that of Boston and has a limited number of contiguous cultural villages. A word in the right quarter can work wonders. John has unquestionably annoyed some long armed media folk and politicians. You’d have to read the book to find out. I got mine online from the publishers Currach Press
currach

These are not commercial decisions by Easons, Dubrays etc. Waters in the past has sold by the cartload. What we have here is not a failure to communicate. It’s the interdiction of communication and a return to the 1950‘s when Hemingway was banned, Joyce of course, and the products of the Olympia Press tout court. Is that what the new liberal SJw’s want? Pathetic puling colouring book artists who fear to draw outside the lines. Archbishop McQuaid: What was the colour of the buttons on his cassock? OMG

Give Us Back the Bad Roads by John Waters

I met with Napper Tandy and he took me by the hand
and he said, "How's dear old Ireland and how does she stand?"
"She's the most distressful country that you have ever seen
they're hangin' men and women there for wearing of the green"

(fromThe Wearin’ of the Green by Dion Boucicault)

If you met John Waters author of Give Us Back the Bad Roads just out published by Currach Press he would tell you the same thing only the wearin’ of the green would be the values of an Ireland represented by his father and the hangin’ the attempt at his reputational destruction by fellow journalists. Luckily though he has a very accurate litigation rifle and caused some not very smart people to smart in the wallet Not that he was after a pay day as he explains. He was described as a ‘homophobe’ by a drag queen on a popular chat show that goes out pure live. The host did not attempt to challenge this characterisation which had and has no basis. At that point an Apology was sought to be broadcast the following week. The form offered by the legal weasels of R.T.E. was of the ‘we regret’ type. They played it out and were eventually brought to the point of settlement on foot of definite court action. His colleagues in journalism did not support him as it is supposed to be bad form to sue when you’re a journalist because as you know suing is ruinous for newspapers being a limitation on what they can print. It sends the wrong message.

Running contrary to the liberal consensus gets you into trouble when you work on the Irish Times, the paper of record. The Byzantine machinations of its hierarchy as they practiced what Sean O’Faoilan called the Irish art of palicide is told viz. ‘the art of drinking to your friend with one hand while stabbing him in the back with the other’. The story has a darkly comedic aspect to it particularly his encounter with the Religious Affairs correspondent Patsy McGarry at Waters’ mother’s funeral. Fintan O’Toole, Ireland’s one and only public intellectual of the Western world adds a sly Gramscian note to the liturgy.

John Waters supplied the conservative counter to the Times line on gay marriage and abortion. You might well say that was his role as a columnist. Unlike Paul Claudel he was not forgiven for writing well. He left in 2014.

If it was all just this then it would be a dispiriting read even if at the end calumny and detraction were vanquished. The book has a hero, Waters’ father and most alternate chapters focus on him. Does John mention his name, he may have but I choose to believe that he didn’t for his father is both a man and fatherhood, the good connection of a son working with him and not talking about it, not ‘sharing’. The grinding of the valves of an engine that his father set him to do when he was 12 was a way to condition his spirit and to show him that patience was all the strength man needs.

The job went on for weeks and then months, with occasional breaks when you were feeling unwell and I was required to come along on the run to help with the mailbags and the newspapers and the day-old chicks and the 80-year-old passengers. This was a welcome relief from the grinding and yet I remember going back to the task afterwards with a new zeal. The progress on any given day was so infinitesimal as to be undetectable......
But even towards the end, as I was beginning to note the fruits of my somnambulant exertions, you were relentless. Every evening you would return, shove up your glasses, peer expectantly at the valves and their seatings and pronounce: “More grinding”.

Eventually the valves pass:

That Sunday, we reassembled the engine, restoring the block with its new gaskets and the other reconditioned parts you had prepared. I remember watching you as you wired in the battery and connected the jump leads. The engine burst into life with a thunder of protest and a ferocious belching of smoke. It spluttered for a few moments, then found a rhythm and calmed down to a purr. We stood there listening to it, without speaking, each paying attention for any telltale irregularity. There was none. You nodded. “It might not be so bad,” you said. I don’t think you ever praised me so highly. To be standing there together in the balm of that noise, knowing what it signified and what it had arisen from, we were united in a way that would never be erased.

His relationship to his daughter Roisin and shared access with Sinead O’Connor, her mother, was gained by a court process which one gathers made valve grinding seem a pleasant hobby. Non disclosure agreements I surmise oblige silence on that subject. John has been a lone voice in support of father’s rights which are often ignored in court proceedings.

How does Ireland stand? Making great progress going backwards is the answer to that. I got this book on Friday last and finished it on Sunday morning, all 428 pages of small print. Nicely produced with a superb photo on the cover of the author’s father pulling an engineless Model T after him with a rope. The car is packed with children and young lads.