A Few Words with American Men

At Lawrence Auster's VFR the case of a 35 year old nurse is discussed. She got "romantically" (this is probably my most-loathed Americanism among countless much-loathed Americanisms) involved with an Iranian asylum seeker seven years her junior. She tried to break it off with him after he failed to pay the instalments for the refund of the 3,000 GBP (no less) he stole from her bank account. For that, he stabbed her to death 130 times in the face and neck.

Again: Here we have a mature, educated and (judging from the one picture at VFR) very attractive woman who embarks on a relationship with an unsavoury grease ball 7 years her junior. She had been unfazed by the abysmal record of relationships between European women and Middle-Eastern (read: Muslim) men. She considered it a serious relationship. She obviously granted him access to her bank account. She even didn't break off with him after she caught him stealing, only after he failed to pay for the refund. One of the commenters at VFR says:

"I just don't get what is in the minds of these women? Is it really just overwhelming liberal/ ideological tendencies that draw them to men whom they should know will do nothing for them then bring probable heartache or even death itself?"

We traditionalists need to come up with convincing answers to these questions because there are legions of young, single men in America thinking the same thing and the Gamers are ready and standing by to give them what they want. The Gamers will say it is inherent to woman's nature to seek danger and excitement and male dominance rooted in biological evolution, so learn to be dangerous, exciting, and alpha, or else you are doomed to a miserable, single existence. At the very least, this is a coherent, rational sounding explanation to the average guy, and it has some truth to it, notwithstanding the broader materialist/nihilist worldview to which it appeals. With the Gamers confidently announcing exegesis on these types of phenomena we can't be left scratching our heads.

The Gamers never made much sense to me. They are trying to explain away the fact that American men voluntarily gave up their rights and their duty in the name of political correctness and are now whining about being discarded as "beta males". Worse, to justify it, they are searching for "a coherent, rational sounding explanation", while committing a serious fallacy. How can it be biologically "inherent to woman's nature to seek danger and excitement" in male dominance when human life had been at all times about raising children in safety -- freedom from physical threats and starvation, which is about the opposite of the female yearning alleged by the Gamers? Do unemployed Muslim grease balls fit into such a pattern of providing for the mutual offspring in every aspect? Good joke!

Yes, traditionalists need to come up with convincing answers to these questions indeed. What about a little bit of ... traditionalism? Forty years of "emancipation", forty years of being able to make "choices" have proven that women are, by and large, unable to make sane, reasonable choices. They need the strict guidelines of a traditionally organised society under male rule.

What went wrong? Social stigmata have been removed from our consciousness as unjust. Obviously, justice and fairness is a concept alien to the female mind. While the original idea was, for example, to de-stigmatise a poor little wench who had been seduced by one ruthless male predator and born an illegitimate child, womanhood in general took it as an invitation to have as many illegitimate children as they liked. While the original idea was to de-stigmatise divorced women -- How could one to be expected to know what suffering laid behind anything like that! -- they took it as an invitation to discard their marriage vows as irrelevant. While the original idea was, for example, to do away with something as evil as social, religious or racial boundaries, womanhood in general took it as an invitation to embark on a "relationship" with any bum who happened to catch their undiscerning fancy. I could quote more examples. You get the general idea?

Women need to be married young within their peer group, getting a divorce ought to be considerably impeded; and parents ought to get their guts back to tell their children: "THAT IS NO COMPANY FOR YOU!"

I, as a German, see quite a few typically American traits which have very probably aggravated the status quo and while I am trying not to be judgemental, this ought to be addressed. For once, I don't think the degree of materialism at our end is quite that high. That is not a good or bad thing per se, materialism is a healthy notion and can be, without doubt, constructive, and idealism extremely destructive. In fact, German idealism has led us disastrously astray, historically. However, recognising such cultural differences may be helpful and it just is a fact that good looks of a woman don't seem to be considered here all that much as a marketable item. I see friends and the daughters of friends who have, for better or worse, chosen men far below any reasonable expectations they objectively had. The only one who married a seriously rich man did it for love (and paid a high price for it), but by and large those marriages worked out as well as one can possibly expect in a society without rules. Then there is the American body cult. And while I admire the polish of American women (I have profited from it by buying as-good-as-new designer clothes at Ebay) it has a flipside as well. If some breast implants on two legs with remarkable credentials of American dentistry in what might once have been a pretty girl's face and an artfully dishevelled blond mane on top are considered a paragon of American beauty, something stinks. Not to speak of the organised sexual child abuse that goes by the euphemism of "child beauty pageants" and which for some reason makes me mad beyond anything else.

Does anybody seriously think that FATHERS want their little girls to strut their stuff like that? And can it in any way be considered ethical, or even useful, to base a woman's market value on that and JUST that?

Dear American men, get a grip on reality. If you want to save your home and the West, you don't need to be blown to smithereens by an Islamist bomb in some remote country. Go home and tell your wives as a first step that you expect a decent dinner, a clean house and a smiling face if you come home after a day of work providing for her and your children's livelihood. Tell your daughters that they are not (NOT!) to dress like sluts, that "sexy" is a no- and "popular" a rather doubtful standard. Tell your children that you expect them to keep up some degree of societal quality, that people are only very theoretically all the same and that Salsa classes are not the right place to meet somebody for a lasting commitment. And then go and give some spine back to your sons who have been in the meantime emasculated by generations of feminists (not all of them female) kindergarten workers, teachers, psychologists, therapists and other assorted scum of the earth. Just as a couple of first steps.

I, personally, think it's too late, but I couldn't keep my big mouth shut.

An Intact Sense for Class Distinction Helps to Keep the Language Precise and Beautiful

If one talks to Americans, the "stuffiness" of the English generally, but specifically of their language, is a target of frequent ridicule. Such a judgement, however, reveals an endearing lack of perception of a thing they know a fig about, but which still has a pull among the British, in spite of many strident assurances to the contrary: Class. One gets more often than not shrieks of disgust in return for mentioning the c-word, but as a matter of fact, it's alive and thriving and language is one of its main expressions.

There are, of course, other class indicators, for example at what time of the day one has what kind of meal, what clothes one wears, houses -- where and how, and whether one likes the late Princess Diana or not. The latter, in fact, managed to draw a sharply defined line between the middle classes, who adored Diana because she displayed ad nauseam all the maudlin and phoney values of which the middle classes are so fond, and the upper-classes, who hated her because she was, as "Private Eye" put it in a meanwhile removed article, "a neurotic, irresponsible and manipulative troublemaker who had repeatedly meddled in political matters that did not concern her and personally embarrassed Her Majesty The Queen by her Mediterranean love-romps with the son of a discredited Egyptian businessman".

The following (maybe, one hopes, not even apocryphal) joke puts it to a "T": Princess Diana visits the Queen Mother in hospital. Diana: [high voice] "I've come to hold your hand." Queen Mother: [even higher voice] "Piss orf!" Both, the very direct, unfussy linguistic approach and the pronunciation are proof of the old lady's impeccable pedigree.

Listening to Brits while making guesses about their social background is both, fun and revealing. The strongest class indicator of them all is the short little word "pardon". THE one big class divide between people who say "pardon" because they think (and, for the non-native bystander, quite understandably so) that it is polite, and those who consider it a horrible genteelism too unsmart for words. The latter will say "eh", "what" or "sorry" instead. Think a smoke-filled room full of crusty old colonels, all deaf, shouting at each other, hand behind ear, on the top of their voices: "EH? EH? WHAT did he say? EH? EH???" Then there is this only at first sight droll story about the little English boy who informed his teacher: "My Mummy says pardon is a worse word than fuck." Befuddled, I asked a friend, an Old Etonianin in his eighties, whether that is true, and after very short contemplation he was positive that there are occasions where a gentleman might say "fuck", but never, not to save his life, would he ever say "pardon".

So far my own fieldwork, and I have strong supporters:

Post-war Britain was much shaken by an article in the bulletin of a Finnish learned society. In a paper on "English Upper Class Usage” Professor Alan S. C. Ross of Birmingham University stated, it was in 1954, that it was "solely by its language” the upper classes were "clearly marked off” from the middle and lower classes. To prove his point, Ross listed the ways a "U-" (for upper class) speaker differed from a "non-U" speaker. For example: The former would say rich, false teeth, house, jam, jersey, and lavatory/loo the latter wealthy, dentures, home, preserve, jumper/pullover/cardigan and toilet; the former would pronounce, for example, forehead as forrid, power as par, the latter as fore-head and pow-er; and so on. "The lorst par of the British Empar" indeed! I once was asked in an upper class house (NEVER say ***shudder*** "home"!) whether I wanted to take a "shar" as the hot water supply was a bit erratic. It took me a few moments to realize that the host meant "shower".

What H.L. Mencken said 1921 in "The American Language" is still spot on:

The Englishman seldom tries to gloss menial occupations with sonorous names; on the contrary, he seems to delight in keeping their menial character plain. He says servants, not help. Even his railways and banks have servants; the chief trades-union of the English railroad men is the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants. He uses employé in place of clerk, workman or laborer much less often than we do. True enough he often calls a boarder a paying-guest, but that is probably because even a lady may occasionally take one in. … He avoids displacing terms of a disparaging or disagreeable significance with others less brutal, or thought to be less brutal, e.g., ready-to-wear, ready-tailored, or ready-to-put-on for ready-made, used or slightly-used for second-hand, popular priced for cheap, mahoganized for imitation mahogany, aisle manager for floor-walker (he makes it shop-walker), loan-office for pawn-shop."

Obviously, an intact sense for class distinction helps to keep the language precise and beautiful.

However, whatever their merits, Ross’ "U versus non-U" observations would have remained in Finnish obscurity, had it not been for Nancy Mitford, who, in addition to being a brilliant novelist, was also (so Evelyn Waugh) "an agitator - agitatrix, agitateuse? - of genius". Mitford jumped on Ross’ concept and impishly developed it into an article called "The English Aristocracy”. Partly prank, partly accurate, the "U versts non-U" flap was eventually memorialised in Mitford's extremely witty and funny book "Noblesse Oblige", an eccentric analysis of aristocracy, Englishness and language. "Poetus Laureate" John Betjeman contributed the following poem where virtually EVERY word is socially stigmatised:

How To Get On In Society
Phone for the fish knives, Norman
As cook is a little unnerved;
You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes
And I must have things daintily served.

Are the requisites all in the toilet?
The frills round the cutlets can wait
Till the girl has replenished the cruets
And switched on the logs in the grate.

It's ever so close in the lounge dear,
But the vestibule's comfy for tea
And Howard is riding on horseback
So do come and take some with me

Now here is a fork for your pastries
And do use the couch for your feet;
I know that I wanted to ask you-
Is trifle sufficient for sweet?

Milk and then just as it comes dear?
I'm afraid the preserve's full of stones;
Beg pardon, I'm soiling the doileys
With afternoon tea-cakes and scones.

Even after almost 50 years and in spite of all passionate pledges to the contrary, the social dimension of language is still considerable. In more recent times, the as observant as funny journalist and writer Jilly Cooper started all over where Mitford stopped and cultivated those class pranks to an art form in her novels.

The bottom line is, that certain features of language are still used to put people in their place and to keep them there. Although a clever parvenu might learn "received pronunciation", as Eliza Doolittle did from 'enry 'iggins, he (or she) won't have an easy life, as the snags are many.

A biblical example of language as a gatekeeper is given in Judges 12:

4 Jephthah then called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. The Gileadites struck them down because the Ephraimites had said, "You Gileadites are renegades from Ephraim and Manasseh."
5 The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, "Let me cross over," the men of Gilead asked him, "Are you an Ephraimite?" If he replied, "No,"
6 they said, "All right, say `Shibboleth.'" If he said, "Sibboleth," because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan.

As a result of this sad story, the word "shibboleth" is used to describe a linguistic marker that distinguishes one group from another. But it's not only "U" versus "non-U", it's the other way round as well. It was George Bernard Shaw who said that it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without being hated or despised by another Englishman (or words to that effect) and people still object to people "gentryfying" their voices like Mrs. Thatcher ironing out her lower-middle class vowels or, the other way round, "plebifying" them. Jilly Cooper tells in her hilarious appraisal of British society, "Class", the as funny as sad anecdote of working class hero and heir to the Wedgwood billions, Lord Stansgate (now "Tony Benn") "yer-knowing folksily all over his electorate". "Don't call me Sir, my good man" he was heard ticking off some unhappy Labour supporter in a pub.

The bottom line is that the more precise, direct, short, simple, Anglo-Saxon (as opposed to Romanic), non-politically correct, less explanatory or unsentimental the choice of words is, the more likely it is that one is talking to a "U"-speaker. Scent, not perfume (words that come from a Huntin', Shootin', Fishin' background are obviously very "U"), jam, not preserve, cake, not gateau, to pee (or - if you like - to piss), not to urinate, house, not home, racing, not horse racing. Talking about horses… of course one "rides" not "horse rides" or, (heavens forbid!) "horse back rides". One is "rich" not "well off", "puts down" an old dog and don't "put it to sleep", has an "affair" not a "relationship", "dies" and doesn't "pass away". And one does definitely NOT EVER use "cute-isms" like "doggie" or "horsey" and NEVER NEVER platitudes like "pleased to meet you" or "Cheers"!

I don't quite agree with some of the learned people above who claim that the vocabulary distinguishes the upper from the middle and lower classes. I remain adamant that there are certain important and characteristic similarities between the upper and the working classes. The concept behind this, I think, is that the upper AND lower classes are oblivious to public opinion and, both for their own obvious reasons, not interested in social climbing and thus less pretentious and less interested in "education", whilst notions like "getting on in life", social advancement, and the impression one might make on others ("what WILL people say!") are typically middle class and thus lead to a more pretentious, explanatory, euphemistic, politically correct, long-winded, perceivedly "educated" sort of speaking. And as all this is happening in a society that is more and more identified by arrivistes from the (lower) middle classes, this way of speaking is on its way to become more and more the "normal English", presumably just to prove the Americans right.

Oh yes, the Americans! As a (non-native) English- (as opposed to American-) speaker, in the course of my modest fieldwork I found that the implied premiss of my little piece here, i.e. "English can be stuffy depending on the class of the speaker", ought to be amended by "and Americans are the last ones fit to be judges of that". In the course of more than ten years in the Internet, complimented by a bit of travelling, I have found that virtually ALL of the lower-middleclass, pseudo-refined, Romanic abominabilites mentioned above are common American usage. In fact, there are Anglo-American dictionaries on the web to help the desperate.

So we know there are linguistic dividers, but what is the fascination of those Frenchified euphemistic earsores in the first place?

I think there are three main reasons. First it's to make emotionally difficult or potentially embarrassing situations more tolerable ("the loved one" vs "the dead"). Second to bestow status to the undeserving ("sanitary engineer" vs "garbageman") or acceptability to the unsavoury ("landfill" or "recycling center" vs "dump"; "pre-owned car" vs "used car"). Third, and this is the worst part of it, to make the, sadly not always avoidable, icky "facts of life" bearable. While we can attribute the first two to a general lack of taste and discernment, which comes with any preponderance of lower middle class values, the third one is additionally owing to the moral bludgeon American middle class women, whose prissiness is only topped by their ruthless self-absorption, are swinging to keep society clean from what they are perceiving as unpleasant. Anybody who is able to manipulate millions of American-English speakers into re-naming rape-derived cooking oil into the "inoffensive" sounding "Canola" just because they don't like the sound of the former, is dangerous and potentially capable of ANYthing or at least so I think.

The Corporate State - Blessing or Curse?

At her highly intriguing blog A Letter To The Times, Cassandra Goldman published yesterday the thought-provoking entry Aristocracy fosters high achievement. Bringing back the monarchy seems indeed too weird a concept to merit serious contemplation. But is it really?

The sacred cow, or perhaps I should say golden calf, of “equality” is wreaking immeasurable damage on our society. It started with a principle that at least sounds good, that of “equality before the law”. Of course, equality before the law precludes any sort of nobility or aristocracy, and now we are feeling the lack of those.

The principle of equality before the law had its first major exploitation when feminists demanded that women be treated precisely the same as men by the law. The problem here is that women are not the same as men. Women have different capabilities and needs. Women require more protection from roving criminals; men are more apt to be able to defend themselves... Naturally, the attempt to force the law to treat men and women equally has backfired in a thousand ways, and by now, of course, the legal inequality has simply been adjusted...

The mania for “equality” has created in most people a pathological intolerance for being shut out of anything. It has also led to an excessive emphasis on age, as children or adolescents are among the few people who can still be justifiably discriminated against. In the introduction to a recent edition of one of E. Nesbit’s novels, a modern woman told us everything that was wrong with these nonetheless charming novels. (I don’t have a sarcasm font, but let me assure you that the sarcasm is very much there.) She attacked a scene in which a man took one of the boys aside for a man-to-man talk about how he shouldn’t be mean to his sisters because girls and boys are different, and have to be to do the grownup work of women and men. She was furious at how “patronizing” this was; personally, I wish that the boys I was forced to associate with as a child had patronized me that way. She was also outraged that these upper-class children gave orders to the family’s adult servants, and demonstrated better judgment than they did. She did not explain how she thought the children and servants ought to have related to each other, but I hazard a guess that she thought that these children, who would grow up to have a measure of power and influence in their society, ought to have been deferring to, taking orders from, and perhaps even learning from their servants. Reflect for a moment on whether you wish your laws to be made by people who were taught about the world by servants, or whether you wish your retirement fund to be invested in the stock of a company run by such men, and you will see how absurd the notion is.

[...]

... We are now even seeing various proposals to prevent people from leaving their own property to their own children, because God forbid that those children should have any “unearned” privilege. That parents work for the express purpose of creating a legacy which can be passed down to their descendants, a legacy of property or beliefs or codes of behavior or skills, seems to elude these egalitarians. Deprive people of the right to bequeath a legacy to their own children - which is precisely what schools do when they teach children values different from those of their parents - and soon there will be no more reason for achievement of any sort. We have to endure a bit of “inequality” in order to enjoy the benefits of civilization.

[...]

I submit that people had a healthier attitude towards inequality when it was institutionalized - that is, when we had an aristocracy. A thousand social customs and laws reminded people from day to day of the very real differences in rank and station. This constant reinforcement of inequality of rank no doubt aided people in accepting differences in ability, made it easier for them to accept that some people were better at things than they were. They were used to being unequal; encountering a different sort of inequality was just a fact of life.

In addition, the modern attacks on ability were unknown, because ability was one of the few ways in which those born to a low station could hope to rise. Nowadays we punish people for superior ability. Bright children are expected to wait for their duller agemates to catch up, because what is important is that everyone go through precisely the same indoctrination routine, not that they be taught anything. Capable men see the jobs they have spent years working towards being given to less qualified women who then demand the right to be paid the same amount for part-time work. Such madness was unknown a mere century ago.

Bring back titled aristocracy and we will become a meritocracy again in no time.

A fascinating topic indeed, to which I, a European who was socialized in Germany as well as in England, would very much like to add some points. But before I come to comment on the gist of Cassandra's post, with which I basically agree, I’d first like to nitpick about a certain detail: "Reflect for a moment on whether you wish your laws to be made by people who were taught about the world by servants…". I think most people who grew up in a household that included servants (to which I happen to belong) will disagree with such a summary statement, and specifically the generation of the English aristocracy who were still brought up by nannies. I think it is the easy mutual understanding and acceptance of SOCIAL inequality, an understanding that goes together with a mutual respect as humans, which breeds the positive social climate Cassandra understandably wants to bring back. Case in point: English aristocrats of the old school tend to be uncomfortable around members of the middle classes, but comfortable with the working classes and vice versa. As long as such a "social contract" existed, by the time the parents took over (schools, more likely), the children were very much aware about the world.

The funny thing about my own upbringing is that my father was a Socialist. That, together with the fact that we had a live-in maid (or, as it is put oh-so-coyly today, "help in the house") and a chauffeur who worked in my father’s business as a driver when he wasn’t needed, made me aware at an early age of the absurdity of this outlook. I owe that woman the happy part of my childhood, being lumbered with a mother wo was both, clinging and remote.

In a social climate of jealousy so typical for Germany, we, my mother more than I, were made aware all the time that we were expected to apologize for such a non-politically correct member of the household. I guess it is owing to aristocracy still in situ (socially, even if not politically) that such things are accepted with more grace in England.

But back to the core topic: I couldn’t agree more. I have no children, but what you describe is exactly the reason for the wreckage of lifes I am forced to watch everywhere around me. Beautiful, intelligent children of my friends, now in their twenties, who are wasting their lifes and their precious inheritance, not in a material, but in a spiritual sense, because the parents were unable to convey the values of their class, wrecked families because the live-in-servants were not kept in their places, marrying the wrong partner in the first place and being excrutiantingly unhappy once the honeymoon is over, on a less tragic but still absurd note: women from the oldest of families who are cleaning after their char because they don’t "dare" to tell her to do her job properly. The list is endless.

It is difficult, mind you, to keep up upper-class customs if one is living in a very middle class environment. A friend of mine who was taught (as it is the custom in oldfashioned aristocratic German families) to kiss an old lady’s hand, kissed the hand of the … postwoman as well. I don’t think it is all that easy to teach children social differences if one’s ordinary rented flat in an ordinary block of flats has only one entrance and not a second one for servants, the more as the postwoman may well be living close by and in a bigger one. A corporate society lives from symbols and keeping up the lifestyle of a manor is impossible in a rented urban flat.

However, assuming it would be possible, bringing back the old order would be like trying to put spilled toothpaste back into the tube. If one sees how once respectable (well, as respectable as glossy magazines go) society mags are celebrating scum like the Beckhams, or some scummy pop stars whose names I can’t remember, together with the Royal Family, if one sees (and this is even worse) how easily and gladly the English upper classes are mingling with just that unspeakable scum (Princess Diana and Elton John is only one noticeable example), one loses the faith that “bringing back titled aristocracy” would lead to anything positive, however alluring the thought may be. People degrade so quickly without proper guiding and, worse, irretrievably, and the upper classes are no exception.

That lead me to additional thoughts and maybe I am falling in the same old equality-trap here, but here it goes: I somehow don't believe that the upper classes are full of people magically blessed by nature with better insight and manners and the working classes equally magically endowed with social contentment and lack of jealousy, but that the strict rules of a corporate state forces the people to bring out their best abilities. Moreover, it encouraged the will to get on and maybe to reach a more elevated position, a position that was not just defined by the money one earned (or rather: that comes flowing in) but requires a more intact personality. The haute volée we are currently watching is the antithesis of such a concept, as are the hoi polloi. The corporate state required, too, responsibility from its higher echelons towards society and one's inheritance. To put something back into society as well as into one's own estate was an, albeit unwritten, law. As such, it couldn't be possibly any further away from most American ideals of freedom and liberty. It is as remarkable as interesting, though, that I seem to discover an increasing number of reflections on monarchy by Americans.

Cross-posted at Roncesvalles.