Sometimes old books are the best.
This is not always the case — Edgar Rice Krispies Burroughs does not hold up well at all, to name just one writer I adored when I was a teenager — but a surprisingly number of the classics really are good books. This is no thanks to the average high school or college literature class, all too many of which seem intended to rip books to shreds for symbolism, metaphor, and theme rather than those trivial things called “story” and “characters.” It’s little wonder that this same approach to writing has resulted in a veritable flood of so-called “MBA fiction” that’s technically exquisite, rife with fascinating imagery, quirky plots, and beautifully drawn characters, yet all too easy to put down and never pick up again because it’s so dry and uninteresting.
It’s also why certain writers are worth exploring on one’s own, when one can make one’s own decisions about what is good and what is not. I didn’t read Jane Eyre until I was well into my 20’s, for instance, and I’m glad I waited I was old enough to understand the cultural and feminist underpinnings of Bronte’s best known book. Ditto a great deal of Baroness Orczy, who wrote a dozen Scarlet Pimpernel books, not just one; L.M. Montgomery, whom I missed entirely until I was in my 30’s; and more children’s classics than I am willing to admit.
Then there are the old favorites that I’ve read and read again and finally acquired in ebook format because I’ve read them so many times the books have literally been in shreds. These are the ones that still yield new insights no matter how many times I read them. To name just two, it took me years to appreciate the achingly lovely passage about a betrayed woman driven to suicide in Jerome K. Jerome’s otherwise sidesplitting Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), while James Thurber’s brilliant, bitter short stories about marital dissolution went completely over my head when I was a teenager. Even The Lord of the Rings, which I have read about twenty-five times, minimum, is ever green when I pick up the first volume or click on my e copy.
Then there are the books I simply wasn’t experienced enough to appreciate fully until I was middle aged, like Ernie Pyle’s profiles of ordinary Americans during the Depression and the early years of the war. They’re just as good as his legendary portraits of his beloved infantry (the interview with a blast furnace worker in Pittsburgh is particularly good), but I wasn’t ready for their quiet evocation of ordinary life until I myself had learned the virtues of stability. And it wasn’t until I read a chapter in a biography of Anne Morrow Lindbergh about the difficulties faced by educated British women between the wars that I realized why Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night is actually a defense of women’s education and right to an intellectual life even after marriage, not a detective story.
Yes, old favorites are the best, and I expect to be reading at least some of my favorites until I finally put down a book and close my eyes for the last time. Old books are the best books, and the best of these are the ones we read and read and read until they are literally part of our selves.
Unfortunately for America, one of the most prominent, and horrible, men in the country not only has books he’s read until he can all but recite them by heart, he’s doing everything in his power to bring their apocalyptic visions to life. One of the books is as black and shriveled as a desiccated piece of roadkill, and as horrific to behold...and nice person that I am, I’m going to tell all about it below the fold!
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The prominent, and horrible, man is of course Stephen Bannon, the former “Chief Strategist” to the Cheetoh-in-Chief. This man, who believes himself a uniquely insightful anarchist/Leninist/destroyer of worlds/Napoleonic conqueror of anyone more liberal than Alaric the Vandal, has fortunately departed the White House for the comforting embrace of his old comrades ha ha, I made a Russian joke! I’m so clever! over at Breitbart “News,” but he’s scarcely given up his quest to undo the work of generations of patriotic Americans.
As to why he is so determined to ruin the progress achieved by Teddy Roosevelt (and his niece and his fifth cousin) and Dr. King and Alice Paul and poor martyred Jack and the Smith feminists and the martyrs of Selma and Harry Hopkins and every single person named Clinton, ever...beyond the obvious explanation of “ERMAGAHD HE’S EEEEEEEEVVVIIILLLLLL RUN FOR THE HILLS AND/OR REACH FOR A VAT OF HOLY WATER AND A GREAT BIG MOP,” one must look to the man’s best and most beloved books.
I already wrote about Bannon’s favorite philosopher, Julius Evola, back in February, and it’s beyond dispute that Evola’s work has greatly influenced the former Adviser to President Numpty O’Shitgibbon. At the same time one can’t overlook the influence of a tome So Bad It Deserves To Be Rendered Into Gun Cotton With Extreme Prejudice:
The Camp of the Saints, by Jean Raspail — this 1973 French novel, which begins with softhearted missionaries facilitating the adoption of Indian children by French families, escalates to an apocalyptic vision of EVIL ASIATIC HORDES FROM ASIA OR SOME PLACE SIMILAR DESTROYING THE WEST with shocking speed. By the end the reader has been subjected to implausible but exciting developments that range from “maybe in a nightmare” to “the person who wrote this should be in a padded cell scribbling nursery rhymes on the floor with a grease pencil between his toes.”
You think I exaggerate? Take a gander (or goose, remember that old thing about sauce) at these beauties:
- An unstoppable fleet of Indian refugees headed toward Europe even though their ships are shabby rust buckets that would probably swamp once they got about two miles off shore.
- French journalists who insist the unstoppable refugees are out to “enrich, cleanse and redeem the Capitalist West,” and thus are A Good Thing, Like the Mature Films of Jerry Lewis.
- A stunning reluctance on the part of European governments to deal with this coming problem, or even recognize there is a problem.
- The allegedly starving and desperate refugees chucking supplies overboard rather than accept a morsel of grain from South Africa, then rejecting supplies from the EU and murdering an aid worker seemingly out of sheer meanness (or hunger, since they no longer have the evil and tainted Western food to eat).
- Most of the French Army deserting their posts rather than repel what has become an invasion fleet once the FLEET O’DOOM makes it past Gibraltar and lands in the general vicinity of the Riviera, never mind that a) the SS Rust Bucket Ramalamadingdong et al. wouldn’t have made it past Madagascar, let alone all the way around the Cape of Good Hope, b) they’re probably eating each other by now (or possibly those tasty, tasty aid workers) because they junked the supplies other countries sent them and they gotta eat something, and c) the Royal Navy kinda has a base on Gibraltar that sorta controls access to the Med so it’s doubtful their murdering cannibalistic selves would have gotten past the Rock.
- The refugees then swarming through France like locusts after the French Army basically gives up, stealing, raping, eating, murdering, and destroying what/whoever they encounter without much resistance from France, NATO, or the UN, never mind that France (and NATO) had nukes.
- A stunning lack of the UN or NATO, period, which strikes me as unrealistic given that book was published in 1973.
- The entire West being overrun within a couple of years by the unstoppable fleet (and several succeeding waves of EVIL ASIATIC OR OTHERWISE DARK-SKINNED HORDES OF TERROR AND CANNIBALISM AND RAPE RAPE RAPE OF PALE EUROPEAN FEMININITY, unless the unstoppable evil Indians are actually colony creatures that dissolved into their component parts and then multiplied like woa).
- This sad state of affairs includes the US, Canada, and Australia, all of which seem to be governed by flaming idjits that allow this to continue, and never mind that the United States had, y’know, nukes.
- Absolutely no sign that the KGB, the CIA, MI6, SAVAK, SUPO, Mossad, or any other professional intelligence organization has the slightest idea of the coming crisis, maintained an Indian/Chinese/Asian desk, or can offer advice to the universally dumbfounded leaders of the world.
- A stunning lack of intervention by the Indian (and later, Chinese) governments as vast numbers of their their citizens flee for no discernible reason other than “hey, DECADENT WESTERN CULTURE, WHEE!” which is even dumber than it sounds when one remembers that back then India and China were governed by Indira Gandhi and Chairman Mao, respectively.
- Queen Elizabeth II being forced to give Prince Charles to a Pakistani woman as a husband (????).
- A single Russian soldier being the only person left to defy the roiling EVIL CHINESE HORDES fixing to storm the border into the USSR, never mind that Brezhnev had, y’know, nukes.
- Gracie Mansion becoming home to three families from Harlem as well as the Mayor of New York, or that almost all the denizens of Harlem in the early 1970’s were, y’know, American citizens, not immigrants from anywhere so what the hell, Raspail????
- A stunning lack of recognition that the United States was still actively involved in Indochina in the early 1970’s and might well have had something to say about the shenanigans going on in South Asia before the Lower 48 were invaded and Gracie Mansion turned into a co-op.
- The lone holdout from the EVIL ASIATIC/DRAVIDIAN HORDES being Switzerland (!!!!!), which is where the alleged author of this appalling racist, badly plotted, and blindingly dumb “parable” is writing this account for his grandchildren mere hours before the EVIL IMMIGRANT HORDES are readying their final assault on the Matterhorn to kill all the goats, chop up the alpenhorns for kindling, and smash the cuckoo clocks. Or something.
Needless to say, The Camp of the Saints has been a classic treasured by generations of French fascists and American conservatives ever since it emerged squelching and shambling from the Slush Pile of Despond. Reviews from mainstream critics were savage — one called it a “bilious tirade,” which strikes me as unnecessarily mild — while right wing intellectuals hailed it as “simple and brilliant.” Its author, an otherwise distinguished if reactionary writer, was eventually blackballed from the French Academy by intellectuals who were either sickened by the racism of this book or doubled over laughing at the idea of Switzerland being the last Western country standing, but becoming a darling of the far right has its compensations (and royalty payments, hur dur dur and hoorah hooray!).
For all this, The Camp of the Saints was all but forgotten in recent times — and then someone found out that Stephen Bannon not only loves it, but has read it several times and owns a carefully annotated copy in his very own library right alongside his Jabba the Hutt commemorative tea set and a copy of Mine Kramps personally autographed by one “Arnolf Spitler”. It’s squelched its way right back into the public discourse (and the bestseller lists), bigotry, plot holes, and all, as conservatives buy it as a field guide to the dangers of being nice to people with dark skin and funny names, and liberals buy it as a field guide to the wily brain of Mr. Bannon.
The liberals might not be entirely wrong, either. One of the very first things Bannon’s bestest and most useful idiot did as Chief Maniac Executive was attempt to impose a travel ban on brown people from countries where they yell “ALLAHU AKBAR!” which is certainly in the spirit of The Camp of the Saints even though the book’s initial wave of EVIL SOUTH ASIAN REFUGEE types is actually Hindu, not Muslim. And of course there’s the infamous wall that President Trumpty Trumpty Boo Boo wants to put up to keep out the EVIL CACKLING FRITO BANDITOS, which wouldn’t do much against a sea invasion but would prove that Trump’s Trumpitude is too very large and very, very, very long.
Either way, the only person who’s benefitting is Jean Raspail...and if there is indeed a God (or reasonable facsimile there), Raspail is probably laughing at the gullibility of his audience. For irony of ironies, Stephen Bannon’s favoritest novelistic fellow not only doesn’t like immigrants (or Asiatics, or seemingly much of anyone except the doughty Swiss), he’s a fervent monarchist who longs for the restoration of the Bourbons, hates democracy nearly as much as he hates Communism, and thinks everything the Catholic Church has done after the death of Pius XII is abomination.
I wonder if anyone’s told Mr. B?
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Have you ever heard of Jean Raspail? The Camp of the Saints? Do you have an overwhelming urge to vomit at the mere idea of such a ridiculous book becoming crucial to world affairs? Wonder if the last year has been a hideous nightmare and we’re all going to wake up Real Soon Now? I sure as heck do, so come wail with me on this dark and lonely Satuday night….
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