Island of Misfit Goys

946 words

How does a thoroughly decadent man in the midst of a thoroughly decadent society react to discovering the golden thread of perennial Tradition? I, myself, was raised on a steady diet of Monsanto gruel, Hollywood garbage culture, and partisan political theater. Spengler pretty much nails my Last Man disposition:

In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.

To my credit, I’m not contemptuous of the country gentleman. In fact, I’m envious. My first phase of public advocacy included an effort to cram myself into that template. Having grown up in a heavily-wooded rural context, and with my deep family roots in the region, I had more of a claim than most Americans to a regional identity and authentic folk community. It was all a farce, of course. Perhaps some Foxfire-style documentary could find traces of regional identity and authentic folk community in the elderly, but it’s no longer fertile among the fertile.

Allegedly, this still survives in the South. I have my doubts about that, and about the advisability of putting it on life support if there is indeed a pulse; but that’s a Southerner’s dilemma to discern, not mine. I’m not Southern. The Identitaire and related movements in Europe may also have some sort of hope for reviving their traditional national identities and folk communities. I can neither confirm nor deny. White America is, I think we can all agree, an Island of Misfit Goys, a melting pot which has effectively melted away every aspect of our humanity save for our seven deadly sins, the only exception perhaps being our famed Protestant work ethic focused on stuffing all seven of those holes with shiny new products and services.

We can retreat into fantasy, as I attempted to do with my Hoosier Nation project. Plenty of us engage in these sorts of mind games, claiming some tangential identity we have no authentic connection with. And, yet, my encounters confirm time and again that these men claiming this or that “identity” are every bit as ironic, matter-of-fact, cosmopolitan, and decadent as I am. A successful revolt against the modern world must necessarily begin with a successful revolt against ourselves, followed by an initiatic rebirth. Merely pretending to be something other than a godless cosmopolitan sack of unchecked compulsions–or attempting to rationalize those vices within a Traditionalist framework–is folly.

Tradition already has a comprehensive toolkit of solutions to this whole problem: hypocrisy, humility, and discretion. Granted, all three of these are antithetical to our Anglo-Puritan wiring. If you have a vice, be a bit of a hypocrite about it. Don’t fall for America’s creepy public confessional therapy culture. Keep up appearances for the sake of the tribe, striving to model the unattainable ideal. If you discover another man’s vice, have the humility to admit to yourself that you’re a misfit in your own way, and respect peoples’ privacy. Religious fundamentalism is not the same thing as Traditionalism. The former seeks to cram humanity into an ideal form fit for God alone, the latter seeks in its timeless wisdom to make the best of our carnal situation.

I see the entire gay marriage debate as the most recent temper tantrum of the White Misfits. Throughout our history, agents of Modernity have chipped one or the other identity group away from the once-monolithic White American Christian bloc.

A generation ago, the insecurities and issues experienced by Irish Catholic immigrants made them ideal helpmeet of the Jewish and cosmopolitan nation wreckers.

Resentment of Western women toward the patriarchy and its arguably unfair treatment of them made for another opportunity.

One after another, our enemies have turned one band of misfits after another who rightfully belong in our camp against us, and we’ve been gullible enough to fall for it every time.

We can speculate on whether atheists, transsexuals, or perhaps bestial fetishists will be the next White Misfits to be funded, mobilized, lawyered-up, and turned against what’s left of the dead horse that Jews in their immortal spite for Western Civilization can’t help but continue beating. It doesn’t really matter. The horse is dead, and demographic forces ensure that enough aliens will be present to relieve our enemies of the tactical necessity of prying away some of our own as allies in their assault on us.

Soon enough, women, queers, the Irish, the Eastern Europeans, the Southern Europeans, atheists, Marxists, and the rest of the White Misfits will be unceremoniously kicked into the same bonfire Archie Bunker and Adolf Hitler have been kicked into.

Not everybody in our ideal society could or would be traditionally married matriarchs and patriarchs of large healthy traditional families brimming with faith, virtue, and vitality. Even the highest culture has its eccentric old maids, confirmed bachelor roommates, intellectual dissidents, family secrets, rebels, rough men, loose women, and even outright criminals. Instead of indulging this macabre game show where we vote misfits off of our island one-by-one until there’s nobody left, I propose that we acknowledge that we’re a band of misfits among misfits, and get on with the difficult challenge of retrieving perennial ideals and working to help one another embody them in our daily lives. We don’t have to quit arguing or pretend we’re in agreement when we’re not, but we must learn to come together as a phalanx against the united force of Modernity.