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by Potential Frolic

There is this silly german song that conveys in its lyrics something which I think is interesting to think about.  In listening to it I’m reminded of attempts by both sides to trap our people, or our Folk, into various boxes they have set up for the purpose.

There’s the left which condemns us to be the passive principle in our own lands, beholden to whatever groups allowed to “act” as such should choose to do with or to us, and holding onto “us” as a kind of historical memory from which one takes unwilling leave as one goes into the future.  There could hardly be a more consistently conveyed message of 90s media, as I recall it, than the idea that we belonged to some sort of inescapable passing away, that our dwindling was inevitably foreseen but impossible to disagree with.  We were relics, waiting to be retired to our final resting spot.  Having pure ancestry was forecast as being something “quaint” in future times.

And in reaction to that, in rejection of that, there is the furious attempt at rediscovery in forms sometimes militarist - the insistence upon our heroism, our glory, our grandeur - sometimes cultural: Shakespeare, Milton, and whatnot.  Sometimes the literary pantheon is brought in as being a source of glory, other times it is left out, as it is in the most hardcore redoubts of germanocentric militarist religion because people clearly perceive that the soul-hardening which occurs in this pursuit of weaponization is antithetical to the demands of flowering literary culture.  One is reminded here of the difficulties felt by Frederick the Great and Heinrich von Kleist in reconciling their “higher faculties” with the subordination and borishness endemic to their culture.

There is a pious belief in military glory which will argue that this circle can be squared, that after enough soul-hardening “glory”, one also achieves heights of poetic splendor unknowable to others. Yet my reading of poetry and literature dissuades me of this personally.  I think Prussian literature is at its best when its tortured philosophers are wracking their brains to understand how best to fulfill their “duty”, as with Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and for anything touching inwardness of another quality one is left with an empty roster.

Anyway, the words are as follows:

Come to the window, come here to me
Do you see over there behind the iron fence
Over there in front of the store
They graved our image into stone.

Come out in the street, come here to me
Everywhere flowers and garlands, half rumpelled up
It appears that they took our monument tonight
and unveiled it without us.

Go fetch the sledge-hammer!

They raised a monument to us
and every sane person knows
how that destroys real love.

I’ll call the worst graffitti artists of this town together
At night we’ll spray slogans on the rubble that remains.

After another refrain, there is a haunting part which reminds me always of the enforced obsolescence which Anglo-Saxons accept as their role in American society, and apparently also in Britain; the slow waiting game, waiting on our own death, which is the only action which is supposedly morally allowable to us:

Do you see the inscription down there, by the shoes?
It says in golden letters, that we should rest in eternal peace.

Go fetch the sledge-hammer!

The band is called, pertinently enough, “We are heroes”!

By The Narrator

Note: as this is the middle of summer and with so much heavy political subject matter on the table I thought I’d offer something a little lighter yet still relevant. It’s a review of a twenty-year-old film. Actually, as I lay out the entire plot below, it’s more than just a spoiler free review.

It’s, admittedly, a bit of an oddball film, but after viewing it again recently for the first time in years -as well as reading some reviews of it, (plus the fact that I’ve not seen it mentioned on other pro-Western sites) - I went ahead with a write up of it as it struck me as just how pro-nativist the film actually is.

THE BURBS (1989)

‘The Burbs’, a somewhat obscure 1980’s oddball comedy staring Tom Hanks and Carrie Fisher met with mixed reviews and mediocre box office success upon its release twenty years ago, yet its theme is hardly abstract or uncommon.  The story is set in the Midwestern, middle-class (all White), cul-de-sac of Mayfield Place.  Its residents consist of the “rational” straight-man Ray Peterson (Hanks) and his wife Carol (Fischer), pudgy gossiper Art Weingartner, gung-ho war veteran/gardner Mark Rumsfield and his scantly clad wife Bonnie, cantankerous “old guy” Walter Seznick and (of the featured neighbors) nosy teen, Ricky Butler.

It’s the kind of traditional neighborhood where everyone is local and they all know one anothers quirks (such as Ray walking the dog as an excuse to smoke cigars as his wife won’t let him smoke in the house. But all the neighbors know better anyway). It is thoroughly modern, yet quaint and safe in its familiarness.  Into this scene of middle American homogeneity come the new neighbors, the Klopeks.

Little is known of them, accept for their name, yet most seem to have heard, and gladly exchange in, disturbing rumors about them. These rumors are exacerbated by the strange noises coming from the Klopek home at night, and the fact that they are only seen coming and going after dark. The exception to the gossiping is Ray, who consciously works not to notice anything out of the ordinary, as he “vacations” around the house for a week in the world he chooses to perceive.

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This is a bit of a lightweight post that takes me into a world I rarely enter.  But you’d have to live in a faraway galaxy not to have heard this week about Susan Boyle.  Todate, sentimentally-minded YouTubers everywhere have fought back the tears at least 40 million times as overnight this stout and frumpy 47 year old spinster, an unemployed church volunteer, has become Scotland’s least likely superstar.

Since the age of twelve Miss Boyle has hoped to do justice to the gift of a wonderful voice.  The high-point of her efforts was a track she recorded for a charity CD in 1999.  Her chance finally arrived in January at an audition for Simon Cowell’s Britain‘s Got Talent, and this was the show that aired on ITV last Saturday.  Now she has a huge fan base, a fansite, a Sony contract in the offing, and this commendation from Les Miserables producer Cameron Mackintosh, commenting on her rendition of I dreamed a dream:

“Vocally it is one of the best versions of the song I’ve ever heard.  Touching, thrilling and uplifting.  I do hope she gets to sing it for the Queen.”

Singing in front of Her Majesty the Queen, it should be said, is the reward for the winner of BGT every year.  The chances this year of that not being Miss Boyle are negligible to non-existent, and probably less than that.

Well, a lot of clever folks have wiseacred in the world’s press about why this curious little episode has wrought such an enormous emotional impact, particularly in America.  Of course, it’s never enough to say the obvious: that it’s simply a heart-warming and uplifting story, which it plainly is.  No, we’ve been treated to everything from a new anti-capitalist sensibility in these recessionary times to protest against the cult of celebrity to the love of the underdog to the fulfilment of the American Dream.  A particularly viperous Jewish feminist in the Guardian even took the opportunity to berate “us” (in whom it is not at all clear that she included herself) for judging women by appearances.

So I thought I’d also reject the heart-warming and uplifting scenario, and join this motley throng with a few observations of my own.

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