Great Books and Movies
Dean
Some months ago someone asked me to list five "desert island" books. Usually when I'm asked that question, I answer books I read in my teens that I still 20+ years later enjoy re-reading for pleasure.
A separate question I find much more interesting is to ask what books shaped you. The books you read that made you feel like you were a different person after reading them. Books that stick with you for years because they altered how you see the world.
One such book that left an indelible mark on me was The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I could write endlessly about this book, and talk endlessly about it. Much to my frustration, I have only once or twice met anyone who's read it (and no, people who were assigned it in school and just skimmed so they could skate the exam don't count).
Usually, when I mention the book, people tell me it's something they have no interest in. That's the #1 reaction I get. People seem to think it's mostly about "black rage" and haranguing the reader with a "message." So some people, mostly white but they come in all races, feel that they don't want to read some "angry black man" screed. Then there are the people, mostly black but also others, who've never read it but think they don't need to because they "already get it."
I try to tell folks that there are parts of the book that are somewhat like what they think, but it's far deeper and more moving than all that superficial stuff. When I tell them Malcolm X is one of my personal heroes--which he is--they really don't get it. They assume I mean the radical politics (nope), the anger at white racism (nope), the "liberalism" (nope), the "political correctness" (nope), the "anti-establishment" mystique (nope) or even that I just like how it sounds (nope).
Malcolm was a man who grew up having lots to be angry about, who lashed out at the world due to his anger. He turned into the worst sort of street hoodlum. He then got in with a religious group, the "Nation of Islam," that helped him turn his life around. They taught him discipline, self-respect, a work ethic, the value of education. They helped him to have self-pride and self-value. They taught him how to be a responsible family man, father, and provider. They taught him to how to be a leader.
Then one day he made the most courageous and amazing transformation of all: he realized that despite all they had given him, there was something rotton at the core of the "Nation of Islam" group. He had the courage to face that, to say so openly, and to walk away--but to keep everything good he'd learned from them.
He also knew they probably would kill him for repudiating them--and they did. But he died his own man.
Sure I learned something about racism from that book--on a much more subtle and human level than I thought possible. But I learned even more about self-determination, and courage, and redemption.
What's most impressive of all is that the book never hits you over the head with a "message." It rarely lectures. It rarely tells you what you "should" think or what you "should" do. It merely tells an amazing tale, and lets you draw your own conclusions.
Try telling people about it who haven't read it, and they still look at you a little funny. What can you do but shrug?
I get similar reactions whenever I tell people that American History X is one of the greatest movies of the 1990s. I grew up in Neo-Nazi Central when I was a kid in Chicago, and that film was the most seeringly honest look at what those kids (they were mostly kids) are like that I have ever seen.
But when I try to tell people who haven't seen the film what it's about, and why I think it's important, they don't get it. They assume it's a movie that relentlessly hits you over the head with a "message," that it lectures, that it harangues, that it excuses, that it glorifies.... and it does none of those things. It's just brutally honest. You see it, and you draw your own conclusions.
People look at me funny when I say that too.
Anyone had similar experience with books or movies?
He kind of lost me when he went on and on about how white men - all of them - are the devil incarnate. That kind of talk (by any individual about any group) tends to make me stop listening to that individual.
Are you saying that he redeemed himself after saying things like that, and convincing others that it was true?
I'm curious how he did that. And what path that leaves open for others who preach hate today.
Maybe I should read it again.
Every once in a while I hear from a guy (or group) that wants to do a hunger strike to draw attention to father’s issues and I try to dissuade them, and get them to watch this movie.
What they don’t understand is that somebody (or a few somebodies) would have to die for their message to get through. It was only after 10 men died in Ireland that any of their prison conditions changed. It had little or no impact on their major issue, and at a huge cost. Not many books or movies shed any light on the impact an activist's campaigns make on their families.
But I always come away wondering how many do die, in their own unpublicized protests, that we just don’t know about.
Yes, about a third of the way inoto the book he came to believe Elijah Muhummad's teaching that white people were devils. And about another third into the book he came to reject all such thinking. Indeed his rejection of it was one of the things that got him killed.
Men and Marriage by George Gilder helped me a little bit answer the eternal question of Mankind...What does Woman Want?.
Modern Times by Paul Johnson...like Death by Chocolate cake for the mind.
Suicide of the West by James Burnham (which explained a system of priorities of values...the liberal still valued freedom, but fear of the A-bomb made him value security more, thus he changed his mindset, while the conservative still valued freedom as the highest...its been a while since I read this.)
Generations by Strauss and Howe...I am not totally sure how far to trust this, but it makes a good mnemonic for remembering history, and it is an excellent device for extrapolating the future for SF authors. One of the chief problems of SF is straight line extrapolations, and thus really dull futures. Futures in which nothing much happens until the time of the story with bland centuries flowing by...Generations helps you see how eventful history is, and gives you a model to put the jags in.
The Great Reckoning by Davidson and Rees-Mogg...another book I'm not sure how seriously to take, but very interesting. I used the ideas in this for the basis of my Doom of the Mech Empire setting which uses Technological Determinism. The Rise of the Mech Pilots with their Battletech like machines leads inevitably to the fall of the Empire, and to squabbling Knights, err Mech Pilots in a new Dark Age.
Den Beste's piece on Transnational Progressivism helped also. I had a correspondent in Finland, a guy hard left enough to find the NYT's to be conservative. He seemed intelligent, but his ideas just did not make sense. he seemed to be too rational to be insane, but really that was the effect.
And then I read the Tranzi Piece, and a missing puzzle piece fell into place. Now I could understand his logic, even if I still did not agree with it.
The Rules?? which pointed out that one of our key problems was a desire to make a Big Book of Rules for every conceivable situation rather than rely on human judgement.
Milton Freedman talking about Iron Triangles was depressing.
The Prince was amusing in a bloody-handed and cynical kind of way. As a friend told me, 'you're cynical about everything, including being cynical'.
A book by John R. Rice was instrumental in helping me understand properly the doctrine of salvation--you'd think that years of sermons would have done the trick, but preachers can be pretty bad at explanations, and I more absorb ideas than jump to them.
I wish I was more systematically educated in the great conservative classics.
If it wasn't until page 300 or so that he gave up the Nation of Islam, I'm sure that I (at age 16) gave up on him too soon to notice.
Maybe I'll give it another try.
Gene Knapp, the 5th grade teacher at my small, Catholic school, became a friend of our family's after having taught my older brother. He had to be making nothing there but he was one of the best teachers I've ever known. Out of some 20+ years of schooling at probably 5 or 6 different schools, he is one of the top 3, along with my 1st grade teacher (Sister Mary) and one teacher at the community college in Troy, NY. He was also a hippy. He saw the Beatles at Shea and was at Woodstock (I went to school 90 miles north of NYC, near the town of Woodstock, maybe 40-60 miles from Bethel)
By the time I was in 4th grade I was reading at close to a college level. My favorite books in 4th grade were Papillon, The Godfather and whichever Hardy Boys book I was reading. He knew this and gave me Stranger in a Strange Land, the hippy bible as I've seen it called. That book changed my life and, the funny part, is the driving reason why I'm a conservative. It's funny because it was such a classic for the archetypal 60s liberal.
The reason I saw it differently from them? They wanted to be Valentine Michael Smith, I wanted to be Jubal Harshaw. VMS espoused a perfect communism that this world will never see, JH espoused personal responsibility. While JH saw the perfection in VMS' 'religion', it was obvious to me that it would take the whole Martian thing for it to work. In the real world, you might be able to find a group of people who would live in perfect communism. It's possible. But in reality, if you have more than one person odds are pretty good that at least one of them will be a slacker and screw the whole thing up.
I saw the wisdom of JH and have tried to become him. Much of what I read made sense even though it was about experiences I'd never had. Another funny thing is that Heinlein totally believed there was a God, but that book is one of the reasons I don't think there is one.
In other words, that book changed my life in ways that were totally antithetical to what the giver and author intended. Life is very funny.
I re-read that book every now and then when I feel I'm getting off track in my life.
My mother recently saw Mr. Knapp and told him I am a conservative. (My whole family, except for one uncle, believe everything the NY Times and Dan Rather tell them.) He was totally disappointed. I don't know if I would want to tell him how that book changed my life considering he probably thinks Bush lied/people died.
If you're reading this Mr. Knapp, thanks for giving me that book. Otherwise I might have modeled myself on a French safe-cracker or a mobster.
However, I don't have the story that one of my teachers did. She produced God's Country in Eastern Washington... and before one performance, got word that Richard Butler, head of the Aryan Nations, was going to be attending. The theater had to offer every attendee the chance to switch to another night, and after the performance Butler came up on stage to shake the actors' hands (I think many of them dodged it as best they could)— and thank them for a job well done.
He was so damned honest and straightforward. You almost had to respect that quality in him despite that he was hardwired all wrong for the country is he was living in, the religion he adopted, and much else.
One day, some liberal was flapping his or her mouth about him being an American. He must have gotten pissed at the stupidity of whatever comment he reacted to, because he replied:
"Being born in Omaha doesn't make me an American any more than being born in an oven makes a cat a biscuit."
He was at the top of the class of his junior high school. One day he told one of his teachers, whom he had previously respected, about his dreams of attending a law school. The teacher replied to him that law school was "no realistic goal for a nigger."
For Malcolm, that incident was said to have marked the terminus of his efforts to make a life for himself as an American. Which was really too bad. We could all have profited from his wit, his honesty, his intelligence, his fearlessness, his straightforwardness. And above all, his integrity. Because all that he had.
I respected him, and I still do. In some fundamental way that I have difficulty explaining to anyone.
So I'm sorry about you, Malcolm. I wish I could have been there for you that day. And cut that teacher's fucking throat, right in your presence.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Yes, James Burnham's The Suicide of the West was excellent. Other Conservative classics on that level include Whittaker Chambers's Witness, J. Edgar Hoover's Masters of Deceit, Max Rafferty's Suffer, Little Children, E. Merrill Root's Brainwashing in the High Schools Collectivism on the Campus, and America's Steadfast Dream, Frank S. Meyer's In Defense of Freedom, and, of course, Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West.
Other "lightbulb books" for me include Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, Murray S. Davis's Smut: Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology, and Ellen Marx's Optical Color &Simultaneity.
That, again, is part of why he was killed.
What can you tell us to make us believe that just might be true ?
Second I'd note that he broke with Elijah Muhummand's "Nation of Islam" group in 1963, converted to orthodox Islam, went on a pilgrimmage to Mecca, and there befriended muslims of all races, including blue-eyed whites. Some months after his return he announced the formation of a new group called the Organization for Afro-American Unity, which promoted the brotherhood of all races. Membership was only open to blacks, but its charter included the goal of working with other racial groups, including white groups, to help promote racial harmony. It was around that time he was famously quoted as saying, "Human rights are something you were born with. Human rights are your God-given rights. Human rights are the rights that are recognized by all nations of this earth."
He was still no pushover, because he also said, "I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don’t believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn’t want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I’m not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn’t know how to return the treatment."
The notion that all men of all races are brothers was a radical departure from most of what he'd believed before breaking with the "Nation of Islam" group.
Read this book twice. It is worth reading just for the character study alone, and if it had no racial content in it whatsoever it would still be just as fascinating a book to read.
It was written by Alexy Haley of 'Roots' fame, he was a master storyteller and that is the best reason to read this book.
Underline that. Absolutely correct. An extraordinary story.
I happen to remember that was what Malcolm X was preaching before he was assassinated in early 1965. Moreover, most of this was common knowledge around the USA. I turned 31 years old that April 2, and I remember it quite well.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I've also read the speculation that that's why he was killed.
It's really too bad that aspect of his life isn't played up more.
Arnold Harris wrote:
"So I'm sorry about you, Malcolm. I wish I could have been there for you that day. And cut that teacher's fucking throat, right in your presence."
I would have loved to see that. I would have loved to see Arnold Harris and Malcolm X together. I would have mistaken them for three men, since they are both man and a half. Or four men. Such men are the men who build the world.
Dean wrote:
"I get similar reactions whenever I tell people that American History X is one of the best movies of the 1990s, and probably the most important. I grew up in Neo-Nazi central when I was a kid in Chicago, and that film was the single most searingly honest look at what those kids (they were mostly kids) were actually like that I have ever seen."
It is mainly kids -- boys -- that go in for that Hitler and neo-Nazi stuff, think it's "cool". It was a thing among some the "bad boys" when I was a kid. First time I ever heard of Hitler was some kids in 1st grade "heiling" him. Our parents and teachers didn't like that, which is why they did it.
For a while in the early 1990s, I spent some time reading the scribblings of William Pierce, George Lincoln Rockwell, Arthur Butz, and that crowd, out of morbid curiosity. They do write better than Communists. But I soon got tired of endless race, race, race, race, race, Jews are evil, ad nauseum. Those people have nothing more to say and they have zero political influence in America, so I no longer pay attention to them. The media blow them up out of all proportion. I have other enemies to fight, and far better things to read.
Eric R. Ashley:
I read Strauss and Howe's The Fourth Turning shortly after 9/11/2001, a sort of mini-Spengler theory with historical cycles every few generations rather than every 1000 years or so. History has never been a linear progression, but cycles or "zig-zag and swirl", and so it will ever be.
When you further understand that most of them are blue collar poor white trash from the slums, you understand them even better.
Go see American History X. Condemn if you want, but first, understand what you're condemning exactly. Mostly, I think you'll be surprised.
I spent some of my very early life (1938-1940) in the Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's south side around the University of Chicago complex, which was then the only more or less integrated part of Chicago. Us kids would play together around the Midway Plaisance, which included some neat places to ride sleds away from street traffic in the cold Chicago winters.
Some 10 years later, in the late winter of 1949-1950, I was a teenager of 15 going on 16, attending high school and working at a bowling alley on Chicago's north side. I worked there because my father had lost his money as an independent businessman in the machine tool business, and setting pins was my means of getting spending money to buy lunch at the high school. I can never forget that one bad night, I didn't have even enough money to feed myself. One of the older pinsetters, a black guy, notice this and said,
"Here, young fella, you can't do this kind of work unless you put some beans into your belly." And he gave me most of the bowl of TexMex chili that was his own meal that night. I never learned his name, and 55 years later, I regret that.
Three years later, in the spring of 1953, I was called into active duty for a couple of years as a US Army reservist. The Korean war was still on, and most of us expected to get shipped to USAFFE (US Armed Forces Far East -- Korea, the euphemism for Korea). Ours was a newly integrated US Army, as a result of an executive order from president Harry S Truman; a truly great man, even if he did unceremoniously fire the great general Douglas MacArthur, who was another great man.
All of us enlisted personnel -- white guys, black guys, Puerto Ricans, Latinos from the southwest, came from all parts of the country, but with a lot of white and black guys from the totally segregated south. The truth is, we all got along just fine, and we all lived together in the same open barracks.
Our officers and NCOs included whites, blacks, even a Japanese-American. They were all good and well-trained men, and we in turn respected them for it and did our best to follow orders. My last commanding officer while I was on active duty, a captain, was a black man. That was in the summer of 1955 and Rosa Parks was about to start her famous battle for the right to sit wherever there was a seat on the public buses of Birmingham, Alabama. Most Americans, including me, cheered her on.
In the late 1950s, a few years after I got done with my military service, I was back in Chicago, and in Hyde Park at that, keeping company with fellow sports car aficionados, one of whom was a black guy who had a degree in structural engineering and a good job with Kaiser Engineers. There was no affirmative action on those years, and he and Kaiser would have scoffed at the idea anyway. We grew to be close buddies and went on sports car road rallies together, one of us driving and the other man navigating (with primative computers in the form of circular slide rules).
So all told, I've sort of lived my life with the notion that anybody in this country who wants to be a good American and a regular guy deserves to be treated that way up front. And that's the way I always responded to them.
My own life experiences made me a culturalist and kept me away from racism. And I've never had cause to regret how that worked out.
--
And this is why I felt all but torn to pieces when I read that an obscure high school teacher of young Malcolm Little -- a teacher whom young Malcolm had admired and trusted -- had destroyed his early hopes and dreams of becoming a lawyer by telling him that "law school was no realistic goal for a nigger".
So I hope that teacher died an appropriately nasty death for shattering the dream of a worthy young man. Not a black young man or a white young man. Just a young American.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I did see American History X with my brother when it came out in 1998. That film and The Autobiography of Malcolm X ought to be seen/read side-by-side, because they are exact mirror images of each other. I have long known, expecially after reading Jim Goad's The Redneck Manifesto (another eye-opener), that the poor white man in the slums and the poor black man in the slums, the white "redneck" and the black sharecropper, the "skinhead" and the black separatist, are mirror images of each other. The only difference is in the color of their skin.
Arnold Harris:
Excellent. Confirms every word I said about you.
That last sentence: recognized more often in the breach than in the observance, but still true.
"I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don’t believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn’t want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I’m not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn’t know how to return the treatment."
That is just.
It's one reason why I don't take cracks at southerners very well at all, or have much respect for the self-hating kind.
I doubt it was the diversity. It was the fact that most Moslems obviously are more white than black that makes it impossible to see Islam as an anti-white creed.
I'm glad you got a chance to read Jim Goad. I don't agree with everything he says either (e.g., I'm unmitigatedly on the side of the North in the Civil War), but -- his sizzling style! You either love it or you hate it. I love his style, but I have a friend who found it unbearable. It's like a punch in the face. My friend often associates him with his theological opposite, Jack T. Chick. I therefore often associate both with "BOB". And he is right about so many things.
Florence King, in her excellent With Charity Toward None, an encyclopedia of misanthropes, described a lot of fascinating people, but somehow she missed Jim Goad, the ultimate misanthrope. In his controversial magazine Answer Me!* (which ran only 4 issues), he and his then-wife Debbie hated everybody -- blacks, whites, Jews, Gentiles, men, women, babies, sex, music, you, me -- everybody. Except the police, he once had an article advocating killing off everybody but the police. He also praised rapists, serial killers, and suicide. He had interviews with people ranging from David Duke and Al Sharpton to Anton LaVey.
(*The question was: "Why are you so -------- stupid?")
His style!
Malcolm was a man. He really was.
-Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto
American History X was a dark, sad, brilliant movie.
Integrity. All too rare a virtue.