Vanguard News Network

by Alex Linder

(Break, Blow, Burn by Camille Paglia; Random House: New York, 2005, 247 pp.)

This is an unobjectionable but also unremarkable treatment of 43 poems by Camille Paglia, or a language-arts teacher renting her name. It is nowhere near as interesting as her essays or breakthrough work, Sexual Personae.

At her best, Paglia jumps between disciplines and centuries with erudite ease; she’s that rarest of rara avises, a labia licker who likes men and eschews fashionable ideology for facts. She’s humble enough to admit that although she felt her graduate training in New Criticism juiceless at the time, experience has revealed the explicatory approach the proper grounding for larval scholars. Giving students the marxism, post-structuralism or feminism today passing for literary criticism equals giving theory hangers to students without fact clothes, as she has famously said. Menticide is another name for it. You kill people’s minds when you teach them they’ve mastered an idea or argument by discarding/classifying it. ‘Sexism,’ ‘racism,’ or ‘homophobia’ may function as arguments now that their detonators control the parapets of academe, but they aren’t. Someone has to keep the flame alive, and that’s me and you reading this, and in her own ways La Paglia.

Paglia respects the respectable, and that, rather than her irreverance or theatricality, is what’s truly remarkable about her. Genuine respectability, intellectual respectability, includes:

– respect for authors. “Texts” do not exist apart from writers. The claim they do is disevolutionary.

– respect for great men. Great men exist, and only little men, dupes, and judeo-bolsheviks say they don’t.

– respect for hierarchies of talent, etc. There is no equality, anywhere, but there are dozens of schools under hundreds of names rooted in the Big Lie that there is.

You reading this must make sure you never part with a penny to pay a prison ward to instruct your personlet that achievement is something to be scoffed at, or something equally available to all. Genius is no more evenly distributed than beauty. It is our job to admire, appreciate and acclaim it, not assassinate it, or subject it to cloacal shower-rangering like the lowly jew. It is Aryan to admire beauty and achievement, and to understand with mature respect that hierarchy governs everything in life, and that calls for impossible, insane equality manifest the human form of  what in animals is known as distemper.

Paglia respects the men, and some women, who wrote the poems she appreciates and analyzes. She has written in the past of the tolerance for humor and eccentricity, and the stupendous erudition, of the German and British intellectuals of the 19th and earlier centuries. People today think like jews, as jews like to brag. Part of that is thinking there’s a shortcut for everything. Oy, get it wholesale. But there’s no short way around the barn. It is not possible to be a worthy professor without a great deal of learning, which means lots of thoughting and time. Yet today’s schools make it easy and ugly for the students by teaching them that everything is a matter of opinion, but god help you if you hold the wrong opinion. Do these conflict? For too long logic privilege, the mental concomitant of the physical white-skin privilege, has held sway. Time to abolish it.

This confusionism is a fathomable crime. When people speak of destroying cultures and wrecking nations, this is the there there. “That’s just your opinion” – how often one hears this, proffered as battleworthy against a fact-studded, logic-founded casemade. “You don’t know enough to have an opinion,” or a mocking “Are you sure you know enough to have an opinion?” work in rejoint. The dimly lit will ne’er ha’ encountered from outside the judeo-social construct – where  everything is a matter of opinion (except Auschwitz), and to an opinion everyvegan has a right.

It is a hate crime, a bloodless Katyn, to decapitate a nation by teaching anti-think as high intellectualism. This is what has been done. Colleges have been flooded with non-intellectuals parallel to the way Americans have been flooded with Mexicans. The intent behind both floodings was the same: to drown all opposition to jews. The number of colleges in America has risen hugely over the last 100 years. These burgeoning institutions, from normal schools to teachers colleges to universities to solaricus panmentiums, require ever-expanding faculties. The folks who populate these White-taxpayer-funded faculties? Why, they’re the same jews who occupy the student bodies in our elite institutions instead of our kids. College professing is yet another way the ruling jew arranges to live off the stupid goy. He receives a double benefit, for unlike, say, meatpacking, there’s a political advantage to ‘fessoring beside the paycheck. Not only does the nation-wrecking jew-marxist live out of your pocket, you pay him to murder your child’s mind by making him a repeater of the going lies – which always, always, always redound to the benefit of the jew. The child you send off to college is not the child that returns, and to the extent he absorbs what is preached, he is your enemy. A jewish professor is nothing but a state-funded child molestor.

When fifty percent of the college-aged attend college but no more than fifteen percent of the population is capable of college-level material, the books, teaching, coursework must be dumbed down. The resulting institution remains college only in spots and name. Dumb people demand dumb material. They will always find champions. The creation of a vast, political bureaucracy staffed with jews, promoting jewish ideas, eternally demanding more money – all of this redounds to the benefit of the jew and the jew pretty much alone. The only others who benefit from the jewed academy are the tool-minorities; the lesbohomos, niggers, and turd-worlders who are used to crowbar the master’s house until it looks like one of the 8a’s he erected for the coons. The American education system is little more than Aryans paying jews to turn their children into human veal. Deep in debt, repro tubes scarred with of VD from chasing the “Animal House” mirage, the proud graduate is ready to for his forty-year cubicle stall, or at least to press the right hieroglyph two of three times on the mchine. But he has a B.S. in spotting racism and homophobia, pops, so your money was well spent, i.e., dropped down a well, as the original phrase had it. (One of those curious reverse adages created by false cognates, like the exception proves rather than, properly, tests, the rule.)

Paglia fathoms some of this, but not all. It almost comes to the surface in her discussion of Sylvia Plath, her longest entry in the book. Plath’s most famous poem, “Daddy,” is analyzed. The poem includes these lines:

It stuck in a barb wire snare

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak

I thought every German was you.

And the language obsecene

[…]

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

And your neat moustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You–

Plath’s father was a German immigrant. Plath seems to hate him, yet be unable to break free from his hold, even long after his death. There is no objective reason for the daughter’s ostensible hatred. Paglia correctly scolds feminists for blaming Otto Plath and the English poet Plath married before committing suicide for Plath’s demise. Feminism means taking responsibility for your own actions, if it means anything. Women are naturally inclined to have it both ways, so true feminists are few! Paglia is a great fan of the jew Bloom, who directed her dissertation. She makes special note that she and the jew part ways over the literary value of Plath. In my opinion, Bloom is no great literary analyst, merely a voluminous yid-yapper. His critical M.O. reminds me of Fatty Chesterton’s approach to wit. Fatty’s idea of wit was taking a platitude and reversing it. And then looking up and wagging his tail, proud of his crap. Jew Bloom’s idea of lit crit is to take a writer and tell us why Shakespeare is better, in ten or eleven thousand words.

You can be sure that jew Bloom’s dislike for Plath is based on her ethnicity; were she a jew, he’d praise her to the skies. Here is a piece from National Vanguard magazine that ran back in 1983; it is far more sophisticated than anything Paglia comes up with in her speculation over Plath’s curious, near-wistful desires in “Daddy” to claim jewhood. You have to see Plath, precocious child from Boston, winning awards, mixing in with NYC jews, who were feeling their oats in mid-century New York as they remade the literary/political world. Plath, like most women, wanted to fit in. You only fit into today’s AmeriKwa by accepting Germans as monsters, and jews as victims – no matter that the opposite is far more nearly the case.

Paglia on a deeper level understands this. “Break, Blow, Burn” includes few or no poems by jews, as best I can tell. There is a brief, feminist poem by a Rochelle Kraut, who was a displaced-person camper after World War II, but it is not certain that she was a jew. Where she could have included a howler from the noxious, ubiquitous pederpoetast Ginsberg, instead she includes not one but three from the German-immigrant horticulturalist’s son, Theodore Roethke. His poems are good. Ginsberg’s are gay. Paglia knows this, and doesn’t flinch from the correct inclusion and exclusion.

Paglia’s instincts are correct. She grasps which things are wrong, but she does not give any indication she understands the deep reasons. She does not see, for instance, that Plath was not strong enough to withstand German self-hate induced in her by her academic and professional milieu. Paglia nowhere ever that I have seen evinces comprehension of the jewish ethnic attack on normal Aryans that defines not merely her own academy, but our national politics. By contrast, she has no problem seeing the fifties WASP dessicanting the vibrant Italian-ethnic culture.

Paglia is where a very intelligent White man would be who completed college but never read Cuddihy or MacDonald and specifically thought in those lines. As I’ve said before, the default in a jew-owned and -produced society is always judeo-liberal or judeo-bolshevik. No matter the subject, if the man in question hasn’t specifically thought on it, he is almost sure to hold jewish opinions. Education means drawing out, specifically it means drawing out of the water, out of the water of unconsciousness, the well of unthoughtaboutness, into living clarity. Then you see it is not what you vaguely thought it was, as a fish turns into a stick or a weed or a boot or a…corpse.

Paglia knows jews as energetic ethnics, nothing more. Kind of like fags, they seem allies in her desire to bust through the boring Doris-Day mentality she, like the jews, found repressive in the fifties and early sixties. I see in her no awareness of the ethnic aggression driving the producers of “Pleasantville.” I sense she’s honest and would agree if she understood, but it’s quite possible she’s pulling punches. It is not as though she is unaware of attacks and attackers, or is afraid to name them. Although she respects great men and authors and plain fact, she is, in the end essentially an honest liberal. She believes in all the sixties revolutions, but concedes their costs. She’s great for myopic focus on symptoms – the downside of Dionysian abandon – the VD, the drug deaths, the blown minds – but she doesn’t grasp the production values behind Woodstock. She swallows too much. She asks some of the questions, but she leaves parallel questions unasked. She doesn’t grasp that the abadonment of academic standards she laments is the same as the abadonment of political standards she celebrates. Negro liberation is as ridiculous as sexual liberation. If one man is as good as another, then one word is as good as another, then one opinion is as good as another. No hierarchies! Nowhere! This religious absolutism is widespread these days: emotional rejection of the idea that one thing is better than anything else, as long as that anything else isn’t ‘hate.’ Dogmatic egalitarianism with a carveout for our jewgod rulers is the order of the day. It makes no sense, but our sensemakers have been disabled, and our organs of perception had jewish distorting lenses placed over them during the night.

Paglia is and remains a teacher. She is knowledgeable and can inspire. I once wrote her a 20-page letter after seeing her speak on C-Span. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of it. She is what college could be if it were filled with passionate, erudite men, rather than third-rate jewish commissars and their allies. She’s a liberal, but she’s intelligent enough to see that you don’t help people by inflating their scores, or by telling them to feel good about themselves. You help them by upholding standards, and encouraging them in the true ways of developing ability. You teach them to read by a method that works; you teach them to distinguish the better from the worse. You encourage them to respect and appreciate the right things. That’s honest education. Telling people what to think while teaching them to hate reading isn’t education, it’s reeducation.

But as I say it is interesting that Paglia features non-jews, positive Germans, Roethke and Plath. You can be certain a jew or colored compiling this list would have included at least five poems from jews, and five from coloreds, even though jews are lousy poets and coloreds aren’t good at anything. Farthest Paglia goes is to includes “Jazzonia” from Langston Hughes, and a couple other poems that appear to have leaked from African unpenneds.

Poetry itself is not particularly interesting, a minor art at best. Take this poem, her first selection. It is a sonnet by Shakespeare. It is excellent, there’s no doubting that.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the deathbed whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

First rate, even if people say so.

But while one can appreciate correctly constructed metaphors, at the end one feels…well, what do you feel? It doesn’t leave me cold, but it doesn’t leave me wanting more. I don’t know more than I did before I read it. It hasn’t enlarged my conception of human feeling, or my technical knowledge of word combination. It isn’t funny. It doesn’t change my life or outlook. As far as I’m concerned, it’s high-end Hallmark. The only thing I get out of it is amusement I supply by imagining the withered magnate reading this, before his expiry, to a nonplussed Anna Nicole Smith.

The admiration of the difficult for its own sake is the academic fallacy. It’s a matter of taste to some extent, I suppose, but generally things should be entertaining or instructive, or inspiring, or something. Many things that are difficult to do are not worth doing, and this includes poetry, as a general rule. Even good poetry is not truly inspiring, and good poetry is found almost nowhere these days. Paglia’s argument is that it needs to speak to the people, and get out of its academic cloister. This is true as far as it goes. Poets today logroll more than any groups but jews and lumberjacks, at least so it seems to me. Awards, committees, fine writing programs – these things are jokes. Giving awards is so utterly Anglo-Christian, so hopelessly middle class. Awards are given by people who don’t know what anything’s worth. Mencken had the right idea: don’t accept awards. Unless there’s money involved. Awards are a form of approval seeking in which the human race appears particularly curlike. The work awards itself, no exterior recognition is required. Focus on the thing itself, and leave the trappings to the three-named she-marketers with nothing better to do. If you’re a man engaged in work and you don’t know whether or not it’s good, then you’re a sorry creature. The rest doesn’t matter. Today the jews rule, tomorrow somone else. The canons of merit aren’t going anywhere. They’re what matters. The fixed poles of Great Men show the truth, no matter the age. That goes for politics as well as art. The conservative tide rolls White-segregationist, recedes judeo-integrationist, but the Piercean stanchion stands where it always was.

This book is worth reading, especially for those seeking honest, high-school-level discussion of a few dozen well known, well wrought short poems. For others, Paglia’s essays are far more interesting, and rereading better repays your time, particularly if you’re considering or attending graduate school. I’ll comment more on them when I refind them in my piles.