HBD Books

I mention Paul Gottfried a lot because I really appreciate his writings.  It’s only because of him that I know the extent of speech code laws in Germany. A guilty pleasure is reading about his dislike for liberals as people.  I tend to like most of them that are simply followers, but true believers-anthropology professors that believe gender is a “social construct”-I hope the worst for.

The most interesting part of his last book Encounters is the introduction, where he gives his impressions of the students and educators he’s met.

The liberal establishment, or whatever establishment controls such matters, may have trouble dealing with someone who is imagined to inhabit a parallel universe.  That may be in fact the way I’m perceived.

But the perplexity I’ve occasioned is definitely mutual: I’ve spent much of my adult life trying to understand those who have marginalized me, but I have done so with only limited success.  My investigations of contemporary history have often seemed like journeys into someone else’s era.  Particularly obvious has been my alienation from today’s youth culture.  About two years ago, for example, while I was teaching a college class in Western civilization, I asked my students if they had heard of Julius Caesar.  Only three of my thirty students answered that they had; and none admitted to having read a historical narrative before having been forced to take my course.  Then I asked whether my students knew which group had been the most persecuted: women, gays, or blacks.  A lively debate followed full of varied claims to victimhood.  The sundry persecutions that my students cited were all supposedly connected in some fashion to a certain erstwhile junior senator from Wisconsin.  In the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy had somehow managed to unleash harm against all minorities simultaneously.  Although a stray fact might have been mixed into this gibberish, I have yet to determine what it was.  Nor can I say that this litany of lamentation affected my students emotionally.  Once it was over, they went back to jabbering on their cell phones and supplying each other with information about which designer’s jeans were on sale at the local mall….

The students I now encounter in my nonage, with all due respect to Samuel Huntington, represent the “West” not at all.  They are merely consumers who occupy the space of what used to be the Western world, and they fall over themselves trying to repudiate the “sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic” culture that preceded them.

I guess that’s why Gottfried wrote that people ask him if he gives out suicide razors with his books.

My students are certainly not the worst or the most incomprehensible of the younger generation.  Even harder for me to appreciate is the IQ elite…

Our cognitive elite has been happy to defend political censorship and social engineering. Its members have been conspicuously engaged in every effort to impose secularism and political correctness as a new religion.  For all their test-taking intelligence, they are the last human beings I could imagine trying to preserve what was once understood as high culture.  But then it is hard for me to understand what makes the rising generation tick-harder, that is  to say, than being able to explain the nineteenth-century French bourgeoise, Hellenistic historians, or other groups I have treated in my scholarship.  Moreover, the contempt of the new elite for the old civilization has percolated downward with significant results.  Just consider the attitudes of those who teach in our schools and of their not very bright students.  What I have heard in my classes is presumably what professors at Harvard and Berkeley are able to say with less syntactical awkwardness.  It is easy to trace how their rejection of gender roles and other inherited social arrangements (until recently thought to be rooted in nature) has played out at the bottom of the educational food chain.  Noticing how our postbourgeois master class attracts intellectually insecure imitators has not enhanced my affection or respect for that group…

Despite my occasionally happy memories of colleagues and students, it is obvious that I have not fitted into my profession snugly.  Each time I think about this, I recall a particular movie that I have watched more often than most of the other films in my wife’s VHS repertoire: Being There (1979).  What once most amused me about this Peter Sellers movie, scripted by the talented but mentally and morally unstable Jerzy Koszinski, was the depiction of it key figure, a long-secluded gardener who rises to power and influence owing to a series of misimpressions.  Having lived in Washington, it dawned on me that this spoof about a simpleton (played by Sellers) mistaken for an international-relations expert was not far off the mark.  But as I watched the film several more time, the lines that stayed with me longest were the ones uttered by the millionaire husband of actress Shirley MacLaine, played by Melvyn Douglas.  This ailing business tycoon gives instructions that at his funeral someone read a few thoughts he has scribbled down for posterity.  One of his observations is the following: “I have known a lot of common working people, who also knew me.  And I can’t say we’ve liked each other.”  My older son and I laugh uproariously each time we hear that line.  But in my case the laughter is caused by the fact that the passage epitomizes my professional relations.  I have indicated that I would like those lines read at my gravesite, but with the appropriate substitution of academics for working men.

…I have developed a Nietzschean reaction to the girly men and virago women that populate university settings.  There is for me something deeply unpleasant about such environments, although perhaps I’m reacting to these annoyances far more than I should.  When I met Beverly Jarrett, the gracious former director of the University of Missouri Press, two years ago at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Philadelphia, I began raging at the sight of the mannish women and mincing feminized males, all of whom were dressed with the sartorial gracelessness of a televangelist.  Although my interlocutor agreed that “they do look weird,” she may have been only trying to be polite.

I smile reading that.  Gottfried’s love for his family and hatred for liberals both shine through.

I was a little surprised to see one of his last columns up on TakiMag.  It turns out that one of his sons is a speechwriter for Sonia Sotomayor.

My younger son Jonathan, who has clerked for a while for Sonia Sotomayor, produced several of the speeches that this judge has delivered since going to DC, including the new Justice’s praise of a “more perfect union” given earlier in the week. Jonathan is a gifted wordsmith, who has also done well as a corporate attorney. He and I obviously do not share the same political views, but I can still feel pride for what he has accomplished—and what he has avoided.

What can be worse than being a multicultural leftist?

Equally to his credit, Jonathan did not turn into a copy of Max Boot or of the other minicon propagandists at the Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard. He decided to join the multicultural Left rather than to pose as a member of the phony resistance. He also found that he could not accept the unchangeable “movement conservative” dogmas about the Arab-Israeli conflict and the neoconservative call for a global democratic foreign policy. Given the scant political options offered by the establishment media and their manufactured “public opinion,” it seems that my worldly son may have made a relatively honorable choice. Once when asked what kind of position I might have taken had I joined the Left, I immediately responded “a Stalinist who would be able to go after the Trotskyists.” Unfortunately that option is no longer available for me or my son.

I have no idea what the last two sentences mean.  But the message of the article seems to be “I love my son.  We don’t agree, but he’s not a neo-con.”

I have to say that I, like the liberals he’s met, find Gottfried’s universe a little strange. Encounters is filled with fond reflections of his debates with Marxists-Leninists. Here seems to be his hierarchy of righteousness.

1. Paleoconservatives/Libertarians
2. White Nationalists
3. Marxists
4. Multiculturalists
5. Neo-Cons

His personal experiences must have clouded his judgement just a bit.  Still, Encounters is well worth the read for the first person impressions of Samuel Francis, Pat Buchanan, Murray Rothbard, and Richard Nixon in addition to the anti-neo-con and multiculturalist rants.