The Gilmore Girls Occupy Wall Street

4,988 words

“These ladies were so much of the place and the place so much of themselves that from the first of their being revealed to me I felt that nothing else at Brookbridge much mattered. They were what, for me, at any rate, Brookbridge had most to give: I mean in the way of what it was naturally strongest in, the thing we called in New York the New England expression, the air of Puritanism reclaimed and refined.”—Henry James, “‘Europe’”

What passes for “the Right” in America, having first been seduced by apologists for Capital like Ayn Rand and William F. Buckley, then subjected to a coup d’état by the neo-con junta, is in no position to support, approve, or even understand the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. The Bourbons may have, as Talleyrand supposedly said, learned nothing and forgotten nothing, but the gleaming, streamlined Neo-Right (not to be confused with the European or North American New Right) has forgotten everything the Right used to stand for, and “leaned” one thing—“Lower tax rates solve everything!”—which isn’t even true.[1]

Fight Wall Street? What sense is there in that, when the “official” conservative talking heads are all employees of Murdoch or GE, and think, and look, more like Patrick Bateman than George Bailey. As Oliver Stone realized to his horror, he gave Gordon Gekko a speech that could have come from the pen of William Jennings Bryan, to say nothing of William Pierce:

The richest one percent of this country owns half our country’s wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons, and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It’s bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you’re not naive enough to think we’re living in a democracy, are you buddy? It’s the free market. And you’re a part of it.

And people’s reaction was “Fuck yeah! Where do I git onea them MBA’s?”

One theme from the dull contempt with which the Official Right greeted OWS that struck me as more true than either side may realize was something like this, which you’ve heard versions of time after time:

This isn’t a serious political movement worth our notice. It’s just a bunch of sociology majors who can’t get jobs and want the whole world to be like college again.

There’s something to this, but probably not what O’Reilly’s viewers think is there. First, though, let’s back up a bit.

For a while I was merrily documenting each of Jim Kunstler’s weekly tirades against the White People on his eponymous Peak-Everything blog, www.kunstler.com ^[2], as evidence of the White-hate that simmers just beneath the “thin veneer” (as his co-religionist, Freud, would say) of criticism of our gas-guzzling society,[2] which is often the true motive behind all this “green” blather. However, it just got too boring, the same predictable rant, even the same stomach-churning metaphors — pus, bacteria, rancid lard — for the White Plague, the same “just wait for it” as the price of oil rose only to then fell as life went on, until finally I called it quits.

So it’s good to see Edmund Connelly taking up the torch. His whole post is important reading, but the quote from Jim is worth reproducing here, as it contains a very excusable mistake, worthy of further consideration.

In his recent blog “Our Turn?,” he begins with a familiar Jewish obsession:

“Nations go crazy. It’s terrifying when it happens, especially to a major nation with the ability to project its craziness outward. We look back on the psychotic break of Germany in 1933 and still wonder how the then-best-educated population in Europe could fall under the sway of a sociopathic political program. We behold the carnage and devastation left in the wake of that episode, and decades later you still can do little more than shake your head in bewilderment.”

Readers of Kunstler’s blogs will know of his fear and contempt for Americans who do not live in big cities and who are not reflexively liberal in their politics. These are the infamous “cornporn Nazis” (sic) of Kunstler’s nightmares.[3]

The first thing one notices, of course, is the typical judaic myopia; history is all about Jim’s little tribe, and it’s the story of the innocent Jews being constantly oppressed and murdered by the goyim, who can’t possibly have any reasons to hate jews, and so must be completely insane. And indeed, who but the crazed could possibly want to harm God’s Little Pets?

Since the judaics, from Freud, or perhaps Moses Mendelssohn, up to the latest po-mo clown, are always boasting about how their “outsider status” allows them a privileged objectivity about the general culture, you’d think then that they’d acknowledge being a little bit of an interested party in this matter. One might think “sociopathic political program” might refer to the Bolshevik revolution, inspired by the judaic Marx and implemented and sustained by Russian judaic terrorists, sustained for over 70 years, and involving the imprisonment or murder of tens of millions; how’s that for “carnage and devastation”?[4]

Some might suggest the original “mad nation” was France in 1789. To some other “outsiders,” the “psychotic break” might be better known to them as the European Revolution of 1933. What could be crazier than that last attempt by the “best educated” of Europe to ‘break’ the power of Finance Capital? Kinda sounds like “Occupy Wall Street,” now, don’t it?

But for now I want to focus on the small but interesting factual error: Jim is no fan of the big cities. Of course, it’s easy to make that assumption, even apart from his liberal-Judaic background. He hates the Suburbs, as the epitome of our Easy Motoring Culture of cheap oil and plastic, and jobs for rednecks above their proper station, and of course he hates the Rural areas, being a Judaic and all — as Israel Shahak pointed out, Judaism is the only culture that has never idealized the worker of the land, from the Greek pastoralism to the Prussian Junkers, the British “country life” and the Jeffersonian yeoman[5] — but he loathes the energy-wasting, gentrifying Cities almost as much.

Jim, as you can see, is a very hard man to please.

See, Jim has his own version of the country squire going on, up in the Capital District, although his contempt for the proles makes him incapable of the gently amused appreciation Bill Kauffman — “The sage Batavia” as Gore Vidal calls him — brings to the same area. Still, Jim is very much the “country gentleman” in his own way, or rather, a way that hasn’t been noticed very much — hence Connelly’s natural error — and to which I want to pay some attention here, in the context of Occupy Wall Street.

I even have a name for it: the Neo-Rural Liberal.

Ever notice that despite their contempt for rednecks and Babbitts, the liberal prefers to live in a small town or village? Martha’s Vineyard, Fire Island, Hampton Bays, you get the picture? Hell, even the Big City Liberal lives in a village, whether historically rooted (Greenwich Village) or just a realtor’s marketing ploy (The East Village). Berkeley itself is just a village compared to San Francisco (where evil Bankers and the maids live).

Obviously, liberals prefer to live with other liberals; we all prefer to live with our own kind. One only needs to point this out because liberals themselves vociferously deny it they have any such atavistic tendencies, and deny the privilege to Other Whites, who get forced busing and integration, and a sneer if they still contrive (as most do, even now) to escape to those terrible Auto Suburbs or NASCAR Towns that the Jims hate so much.

Those that didn’t grow up among Their Own soon acquire the taste when they go away (and they have to, to Get Away from Them) to college. The “college town” is the classic example of a small town filled for some reason with flaming liberals; in fact, most of them will never be as liberal as they are now, as they act out against parents, teachers, society, “townies” etc.

Even the aforementioned big cities have their college towns: Columbia is located on the Upper West Side—the White part, of course, that George Carlin’s teen gang preferred to call “White Harlem”—NYU in the Village.

This was the crystallization point of the film, The Big Chill; the eponymous chill is the cold world outside of Ann Arbor Michigan, home of the mighty U. of M. That was the last (perhaps only) time any of them were content, or even settled, if that doesn’t seem too paradoxical a way to describe the transitory student life; now, working and living in horrifying cities like Detroit, Atlanta, New York and Hollywood, their lives suck.

The only reasonably grounded one lives in small town South Carolina, but he’s betrayed his “radical” past and become a “businessman.” His guilt is assuaged only by playing unwilling host to his college buds, and fathering a child on one of them, at his wife’s suggestion. No small town prudes here!

He does have a big old Victorian house, though, so that when they all meet up for the funeral of one of their number, they decide to bag the cities for the weekend and try to re-create their student lives in one of those old Victorian student houses on Ann Arbor’s Liberty Street (perhaps a few doors up from that quaint little bookstore you may have heard of, name of “Borders” which recently enacted its own cycle of boom and bust).

“You know, I live here. This place means something to me. I’m dug in.” Of course, the University of Michigan sweatshirt he wears while making that “I’ll talk my stand” speech betrays Kevin Kline’s self-delusion; he has a house full of college buddies watching the Michigan-Michigan State game (how’s that for college town overkill?), and the only advantage to South Carolina, apart from cheap labor to exploit, is that as a Local Businessman, the cops don’t crack his skull for smoking marijuana.

Like all Disingenuous White Liberals[6] Motown may be “the only music in this house” but only because that’s what they listened to at U. of M. (the Evil Husband who goes home to see to the kids, of course, lives in Detroit, not Ann Arbor).

Another early adumbration of the meme is found in Paul Fussell’s Class.[7] It’s pretty accurate and amusing (such as his take on the reasons for the popularity of the Preppy Handbook, and the dreaded “one size fits all Proles” tractor hat), but Fussell just can’t accept the idea that what OWS calls “the one percent” is out of his reach as well; “they have no interest in ideas” he sour-grapes (his ideas, of course) but then he reveals that some (the smart ones, of course) can drop out of the whole class system. These free spirits he dubs “Class X.”

In a devastating review in The Atlantic,[8] authentic Top Class chronicler Wilfred Sheed pointed out that the Class X-ers seemed to be a recognizable type: tenure track academics like Fussell himself, who “never talk about the food or wine being served” not because of superior taste, as Fussell thinks, but because years of cafeteria food and jug wine “have given them palates of stone.”

These are the dreary, know-it-all inhabitants of CollegeTown USA, with their Fair Trade coffee (priced out of prole reach) and solar collectors that take 10 years to “pay for themselves” (not really an option for people living on payday loans).

Of course, in itself, small town life is a natural taste. After all, small towns always score high on those “Best Place to Live” surveys. A whole cable channel, Hallmark, is devoted to hazily filmed fairy tales about big-city career women who find the secret to happiness when their car breaks down in Hooterville.[9] It’s the flip side to the Lifetime channel, where the women are beaten, raped, and killed by their over-achieving big-city boyfriends. Problem is, small towns are full of White Others, who are not only non-jewish, but even conservative. As Wallace Shawn, the WASP Woody Allen would say, Inconceivable!

Those not lucky enough to re-locate to one of the Urban Villages or Collegetowns will work like demons at banking or law or “writing,” and hopefully make enough money, mostly by ripping off the infra-dig real Main Street, to move to some liberal-restricted “Main Street” inhabited by tame, amusing Vermont eccentric types and which “just happens” to exclude the Others due to lack of ready cash: the appeal of the Hamptons, Vineyard, etc.

Since Fire Island has no actual industry or economy, the vacationing Upper gets the thrill of everything he buys being a twice as expensive “import.” Meanwhile, the handful of natives needed to run the cash registers and bus the tables lives in trailers and flee to the mainland after Columbus Day.

The Others also includes the black chappies, of course, other than a couple of IQ outliers like P. Diddy or Henry Gates, who serve as ready exhibits to show that we’re not racists, like those awful Other Whites across town; no “Jim Crow” laws needed, or nasty old “traditions” or irrational “customs,” just the insurmountable barriers of money and education. What could be more fair, as the liberal understands the word?

Even Jim Kunstler fits the picture. I’ve lived around there, and you’ve got to have some kind of money to live a decent life in a hell-hole like the Capital District. But if you do, life can be sweet; hell, if there is anything around it’s cheap, and you mail order the rest, or have it delivered from the city, or custom built; even the carpenters, as Fussell already observed, are likely to be fellow Ivy grads. Money buys the private conveniences, and also the cars and air tickets that Jim uses as he circles the globe, decrying the carbon footprints of the rednecks and other Bigfoots.

Hey, the richest guys in America live in Omaha, NE and Redmond, WA.

So, after destroying the Cities with their idiotic laws and racial nonsense, the Liberal now yearns for the palmy days of ice cream socials and bandstands in the park (“Next stop Willoughby!”), recreated, Disney-like, in areas from which the twin wrecking balls of liberalism and finance capital have driven the Other Whites, leaving the Liberals, like the lucky ones in Blade Runner, to “live the Good Life” in what we might call the “super-Urban” colonies.

Despite all his smug superiority over “urban planners,” Kunstler’s vision isn’t that much different than Robert Moses’. Unlike Jane Jacobs, he has no appreciation for true diversity as manifested in the Big City, and although he wouldn’t endorse Moses’ techniques of political and literal bulldozing, he’d be quite happy living with his think-alike liberal peers in a devastated urban hulk, where the White Ethnics have been driven out from lack of jobs, but the Darkies are kept at bay by high rents.

This became clear to me over the last year or so, as, during a extended period of unemployment, I became hooked on the three-episode weekly marathons repeats of The Gilmore Girls, a show I had known only from occasional jokes and parodies during its initial run (2000–2007). Nothing I had ever heard about it had led me to consider watching it then, nor did it give me any reason to reconsider now.[10]

Needless to say, the show is loathsome on its own terms, but I began to find it utterly fascinating as a window onto the Liberal Mind and its Sense of Place.

Almost of decade of reviews, blogs and forums has already established a Minority Opinion, among even Liberals, that the unintended irony of the show is that Lorelei Gilmore, rebellious child of privilege, is presented to us as supremely beautiful, intelligent, witty, and above all heroic in her struggle against her wealthy, scheming, manipulative parents, while in fact being intensely annoying, self-destructive, deluded, almost autistically self-involved in dealing with those she condescends to notice, and above all both spoiled and ungrateful to her long suffering parents (the father, played by echt-WASP and hometown boy Edward Herrmann, was the hook that got me watching in the first place).

What particularly struck me, however, and is of relevance here, is the creation of Stars Hollow, the small town that Lorelei ran away to as a pregnant, unmarried teenager and where she has raised her daughter (also named Lorelei, or Rory for convenience — see what I mean about egotism?) over the last sixteen years, and who is also, as her namesake, supremely beautiful, intelligent, witty, but — having benefited from being raised by Lorelei and not her evil parents, is able to attend Yale and have rich boyfriends without getting knocked up.

Stars Hollow is in the television tradition of small backwaters populated by dimwitted but good-hearted folk that the main character can play against; Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, NC is probably the classic example. Stars Hollow is unlike Mayberry, however, not just in being in the Northeast but also by being as much a college town as one could have without an actual college; for the convenience of seven years of story arcs, it seems to be located in spitting distance of an elite girls school and Yale, and within easy commuting distance of the ritzy Connecticut suburbs (for weekly parental dinners, leading to the Airing of Grievances — yes, Lauren Graham was one of Seinfeld’s ladies of the week — fueled by vast quantities of Pop’s gin) and New York City (for job interviews with the New York Times right out of school, and perhaps to occupy Wall Street without missing Mom’s home cooking).

Most significantly, Stars Hollow is brimming with small town traditions and ways that are the subject of local pride and care, but which Lorelei, despite living there almost two decades, feigns ignorance of and whose evident stupidity or outright craziness she greets her with biting “wit” and corrosive “irony” to the amusement of steadily declining TV audiences.

The town of Stars Hollow is a simulacrum, to use a word beloved by Liberals of a theoretical bent, of a small New England town but one inhabited by a multi-culti elite (well, one Korean family and a black guy who is, of course, not just hyper-competent but also FRENCH) who think like Woody Allen, while the people who built and inhabit the real Stars Hollows of the world are portrayed, if townspeople, as stupid but amusing to Lorelei (and us, of course) or else, like her parents, monsters of evil.[11]

One thinks of Henry James’s description, for his English audience, of the town of Concord, MA, in the time of Hawthorne:

It is very possible that at this period there was not (even) an Irishman in Concord; the place would have been a village community operating in excellent conditions. Such a village community was not the least honourable item in the sum of New England civilisation. Its spreading elms and plain white houses, its generous summers and ponderous winters, its immediate background of promiscuous field and forest, would have been part of the composition. For the rest, there were the selectmen and the town-meetings, the town-schools and the self-governing spirit, the rigid morality, the friendly and familiar manners, the perfect competence of the little society to manage its affairs itself.[12]

I suppose this must be what Martha’s Vineyard is like: the small rural towns built by White Protestants, inhabited by Woody Allen clones.

The body snatchers came from the Levant, not outer space, and they’ve taken over Santa Rita! And if your town is “lucky,” you’re next! Tomorrow the world?

Lurking behind it all, especially the judaic obsession with the danger of a recurrence of the German Revolution of 1933, is what we might call the Final Solution to the Goyim Problem. For as no less a “genius” than Freud has told us, an obsession with the sins of others is a cover for one’s own sins. The German sin was to do to the judaics as the judaics would do to us, before the judaics had enough power to do so. For centuries, this has been the plan; we’ve seen it what happens when judaics take power during the Russian Terror, and Palestine is only a dress rehearsal, paid for by the goyim themselves, for the Big Show.

As Connelly concludes, the judaics who still form the template for “real liberals” are

a hostile elite that fears and mostly dislikes us—people like Frank Rich, James Howard Kunstler, and thousands of other antsy Jews like them. What will happen to us if such Jews feel so at risk that they preemptively seek to neutralize the “threatening” ones among us?

In Homo Americanus, as I’ve noted numerous times, Croatian savant Tomislav Sunic envisions such a scenario for any group in America that might be targeted: “Thus, in order for the proper functioning of future Americanized society, the removal of millions of surplus citizens must become a social and possibly also an ecological necessity.”

Needless to say, this is the dream of the judaic-minded Finance Capitalists as well: a global economy where the awful dirty workers are safely on the other side of the world, and some day perhaps eliminated altogether in our “virtual economy,” leaving them to live in peace in small towns from Jackson Hole to Davos.

Critics like Peter Lamborn Wilson pointed out long ago that contrary to all the “cyberspace” fluff there is no “virtual” economy, since we need to eat. The question is, how little food is needed? Answer: enough to feed the bosses.

And that’s the ultimate appeal of Rev. Jim’s Peak-Everything gospel: die-off is so much simpler, so much cleaner, even greener.[13] The ugly fat rural “people,” who live and even thrive only due to the anomaly of cheap oil, will soon be dead, starved by the lack of Cheesy Poufs after Peak Oil, and if that doesn’t get them, Al Gore’s Big Sweat will. No need for any messy trains, camps, and ovens. And then the smug, if not meek, will inherit the Earth.

There’s an even bigger picture here, extending beyond television, movies and even the fossil fuel culture; consider this interesting observation from Maury Knudson on the “Shifting Other”:

Prior to 1920, the Great Other in American culture was the seducer in the big city. The innocent young girl from the country would be picked up by the man with oily, slicked-back hair and pencil thin moustache. Or, an innocent young man from the country would find himself in the clutches of a painted lady. Oh, the horrors! This began to change in 1920 because the census revealed more people were living in the city than the country.

By the 1970s we had the movie “Deliverance” which showed the dangers that city folks faced in the rural backwoods. There were inbred mutants laying in wait, ever ready to cornhole you and maybe even bite your pecker off. Oh, the horrors![14]

How did we get from Gomer Pyle, played by Jim Nabors in CBS “rural sitcoms,” to “Gomer Pyle” played by Vincent D’onofrio in Full Metal Jacket?

It’s Connelly’s take on Kunstler that give us the clue: the Judaic dominance of both the Liberal Left and the Neoconned Right.

It’s as if Mayberry were being fought over by two evil real estate interests. One, the Liberals, want to clean out the locals and replace them with students; here we find Kunstlerville and Stars Hollow and perhaps, Zucotti Park. The other, the Right, wants to ship the jobs overseas and drive everyone to the trailer parks outside town, perhaps imprison what’s left, and have Trump build luxury condos financed by Wall Street.

What unites both is a more or less unspoken view of “those people” not as The People, salt of the earth — remember when political movements were proud to call themselves “populist”? — but as basically ignorant and potentially dangerous rural yahoos, a bunch of anti-Semites who don’t matter anyhow.

No wonder that when Charlie Sheen’s bete noire, Chuck Lorre, was looking for a way to instantly characterize Charlie’s character’s potential mother-in-law as far worse than his own mother (a manipulative WASP, of course) he made her a Midwesterner who announces her arrival by complaining about spending her flight “sitting next to some big Jew.”

The Wall Street Occupiers are the Gilmore Girls, en masse, hating Big Money but hating “the people”—you know, the “Tea Party morons”—just as much; the problem with having such refined standards is that it’s hard to make a revolution with just a handful of smart mouthed hipsters as your constituency.

The Occupation-haters share their disdain for the People, though they are willing to be paid to pose as the People’s Tribunes; they love the Big Money—the 1%—who pay for their hypocrisy, and since Big Money already calls the shots, they don’t need no stinking revolution anyway.

In Godforsaken America, the Old Right’s dream of a nation of rooted communities of farmers and small business has been abandoned for Star Wars fantasies of high tech and globalization, and only survives now on the Left, in the distorted form of the Liberal’s dream of College Forever.

It was the future Senator Blutarsky who gave us the epitaph for Occupy Wall Street many years ago, in a movie—Animal House—that oddly enough seems to evoke both the preciosity of Stars Hollow real estate and the funky chaos of an OWS encampment: “Seven years of college down the drain.”

Notes